Bonnybell hesitated slightly. In point of fact, her sojourn in the Pension de Demoiselles in question had not outlasted a month; but “Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.”
“For some time.”
“And then Lady Ransome found that she could not get on without you?”
Reprobation of the implied selfish disregard of her daughter’s welfare had forced itself unconquerably into Camilla’s voice; and Bonnybell, who, with all her numerous faults, was not devoid of generosity, found herself unable to leave her questioner in what would be for herself an advantageous error.
“It was not Cl—my mother’s fault,” she explained slowly; “Madame le Roy asked her to take me away.”
“Asked her to take you away?”
Again for a moment Bonnybell hesitated. Should she “give away” her parent, whom, after all, nothing could now harm, and tell the truth, seeing that it was on getting wind of that parent’s antecedents, and the estimate in which she was held by her countrymen and countrywomen, that Madame le Roy had requested the removal of her daughter? It was clear that at the present moment the girl’s new patroness was labouring under the perfectly natural error that it was for misconduct of her own that the young creature before her had been ejected.
“She thinks that I was kicked out for some amourette! Well”—the hesitation had not lasted more than five clock-ticks—“let her go on thinking so. If I had stayed another month, I dare say I should have been, and poor Claire is dead, and cannot take up the cudgels for herself.”
“Asked her to take you away?” Mrs. Tancred had laid down her spectacles; but though their glowering roundness had been frightening, the unshaded rebuke of the eyes behind them was distinctly more so.
The repetition of the sentence had taken so plainly interrogative a tone that it must needs be answered. In this case the jeune fille idea was of no help. The jeune fille could never have been turned out of a boarding school, and Miss Ransome must be guided by her own lights. Since truth was never a sine quâ non with her, she might as well make out as good a case as she could for herself.