“Shall you only send to meet her at Swinston, or go yourself?”
He had tried to make the question as colourless as possible, but had not been able quite to keep out of his tone a slight indication of bias towards the more welcoming course.
“I shall send. I have no wish to be seen by any chance member of my acquaintance who may happen to be on the platform with a young member of the demi-monde sobbing in my arms.”
Edward Tancred received this fiat in silence; even the shrug with which he greeted it was an inward one of the spirit alone, and in which the shoulders took no part. Perhaps the rebuke implied in his muteness or the stings of her own conscience might have suggested to Camilla that she had rather overdone the brutality of her last speech, for though her next utterance was not amiable, the key in which it was pitched was distinctly less trenchant than its predecessor’s.
“I hope she will not think it necessary to kiss me. Of course she will not wish to do so”—Mrs. Tancred had no illusion as to her own destituteness in the matter of charm; her husband sometimes thought that life would be rather easier if she had—“but she may think I expect it.”
“If she does, and it happens indoors, so that nothing compromising is involved, I hope you will be equal to the occasion.”
There was that something of lightly mocking in his tone which, as Camilla knew, implied the nearest approach to disapproval he ever permitted himself of any of her words or actions.
“Perhaps you would like to go to meet her in the brougham yourself?”
“I shall not be back from London.”
The matter-of-fact answer to a question intended to be a scoff took the wind out of Mrs. Tancred’s sails, which for a moment or two flapped idly against her masts. But presently a new zephyr swelled them.