The plural pronoun dried her tears, which had done their mollifying work, and were no longer either needed or easy.
“I shall be very glad to see the Bletchleys again,” she said, with a resigned acquiescence; and unostentatiously passing a small fine handkerchief over her eyes and cheeks. “It is very good of them—of anybody—to take me in.”
The forlorn orphan note in her voice was the one he could least bear. Already he was telling himself that he had been too harsh to her, to this friendless fragility, shortly to be driven so reluctantly—despite her meek consent, there could be no doubt about the reluctance—from his door. His door! No, had it been his, she would never have been driven from it!
Then the pendulum swung back again; the image of Camilla, with her future of probable agony and lingering death, resumed its supremacy in his mind, and in shocked return to his allegiance he spoke with a cool matter-of-fact kindness.
“You will find only Felicity at first. Tom is gone to Scotland for fishing. You know he is always glad of an excuse to get out of London.”
Had Mr. Tancred been able to see under the large white lids that drooped over Miss Ransome’s eyes, he would have noticed in those eyes a glitter that would have surprised him. “I thought so,” was her inward comment. “Old Felicity has her head too well screwed on to ask me there when Tom is at home.” Aloud she said humbly—
“I must try to be a little useful to her.”
Bonnybell’s words carried a very delicately sad implication that her efforts to make herself acceptable in her present surroundings had been so unsuccessful as to prevent any sanguine hope of their flourishing better in another soil. Her inward ruminations proceeded a step farther on the path they had begun to tread. “Tom cannot fish for ever; and then?” Yet it was not the vista of future expulsions unfolding before her mental eyes that made her say to herself, “He must feel it too, though he tries to carry it off.”
There was a silence, not the dull indoor silence broken only by a buzzing house-fly or a falling cinder, but the outdoor February silence invaded by the beginning melodies of new-wedded birds.
“I am afraid that I shall never now learn to distinguish the notes of the birds from each other, as you had promised to teach me to do,” Bonnybell said presently, with an exquisite modulation of chastened regret.