“Claire was my mother,” replied the girl, quailing, and crying to herself in a passion of self-reproach that she had made a colossal blunder on the very threshold; that, of course, the jeune fille does not allude to her mother by her Christian name.
“And you speak of her as Claire?”
“It was her own wish. She could not bear me to call her mother; she thought it dated her—of course, it did.”
Mrs. Tancred was silent for a minute or two. It would be unseemly to address to the daughter of the departed the vigorous epithets which alone sprang to her own lips in connection with that lady. Presently a suddenly risen hope set speech free again.
“If those were Lady Ransome’s views, she probably did not care to have you much with her.”
“Oh yes, she did—sometimes,” replied the girl, slowly, and with a painful weighing of each word by the jeune fille standard. “She liked us to be taken for sisters; and when the light was not strong there really looked very little difference in age between us.”
Again there was a pause, the potent reasons of her deadness and her motherhood being scarcely potent enough to keep within the barrier of Mrs. Tancred’s lips the expression of her estimate of the scandalous author of Bonnybell’s being. Her next question in the constraint of its tone evidenced the violence done to her inclinations.
“You were educated at home? or were you sent to school?”
“I was at school in Paris for a while.”
“For long?”