The statement was certainly not untrue, but as certainly that was not the reason for its utterance. Veracity being a goddess who had never occupied a very high position in Bonnybell’s Pantheon, she said it because she thought that the jeune fille, up to whose character she was in these surroundings bound to try to live, should and would say it.
“Felicity would have liked you to prolong your visit to them indefinitely?”
There was a faint accent of asking in what would otherwise sound like the assertion of a fact, and Miss Ransome stole a wily glance at her hostess. Did she know about Tom, or was she trying to find out?
Twenty-four hours later the girl would not have put this question even to herself, having long ere the expiration of that time learnt how little the indirect or circuitous entered into Camilla’s methods. Here was need for wary walking.
“She said so.”
“Then the objection came from Tom?”—with an accent of very thinly veiled incredulity.
But the cautious young stranger was not to be surprised into any such admission, nor did the fact that Felicity’s version of the circumstances departed somewhat widely from strict accuracy make it at all less easy to her young protégée to back it up.
“Of course, it must be a nuisance for any man to have a third person always en tiers with him and his wife,” she replied with a judicious generality. Then, divining from something in Mrs. Tancred’s face that the ground was not very firm under her, she skipped off it with a masterly agility. “That was what made it so overwhelmingly kind of you and Mr. Tancred to let me be sent here.”
The humility of the wording, with its plain implication that the speaker could never be regarded except as a burdensome parcel to be transferred from one pair of reluctant hands to another, and the guilty feeling that such had been precisely her own attitude of mind towards her, combined to mollify yet further the person at whom they were aimed.
“Edward and I are too old married people to have Tom’s eagerness for a tête-à-tête,” she said, with a hint of what Bonnybell suspected to be irony, “but”—with a smile that, though, like everything else about her, was unbeautiful, was yet not hostile—“I think it was kind of us!”