“What does it matter if it is not? It will only be the more amusing.” It was the sort of ointment with which she was wont to anoint her own hurts, but it was clear that such was not the balm for Miss Sloggett’s wounds.
“Oh, but Lady Bletchley would be so much annoyed at any contretemps.”
“Why need she ever hear of it?”
A shocked look in the face of the more conscientious understudy brought Bonnybell back at once to the sense of having deviated slightly but certainly from the path of niceness. “It must have been that whiff of Flora which demoralized me,” she said to herself, but she hastened to mend the breach.
“I made the suggestion,” she said, with uncommon sweetness, “because I would not for the world add anything to Lady Bletchley’s trials” (it is just as well to pretend that I believe in that peach-fed old Felicity’s imaginary troubles), “and also because I do not want you to suffer.”
The sympathy in eye and tone was—or to Miss Sloggett it seemed so—unactably sincere.
“It is very good of you to care,” she murmured, still half-doubtfully; but there was a slight mist before her eyes.
The poor secretary’s misgivings were amply justified by the result. Not only was she, as she had tremblingly confessed, new to the task of exhibition, but the “plant” was deplorably inadequate, the magic lantern much too large for the sheet. Before it, in its first innocent blankness, sat the girls, prepared to comment, with their terrible town frankness, in giggling rows upon the magic lantern and its manager. The latter prefaced each picture with a little explanatory speech, the first tinged with regretful deprecation.
“I am afraid that, owing to the smallness of the sheet, I shall not be able to show you the whole picture at once. I will, however, show you as much as I can of ‘The Father of the Prodigal Son.’”
In fulfilment of this promise, the character alluded to flashed upon the sheet, with a very crowded and uncomfortable appearance, and—with no legs.