There was a slight pause; she commenting inwardly upon his phrase, or rather upon a part of it—“no bad ones either.” I know how much of that to believe. “Qui s’excuse s’accuse!” Her amiable rejoinder, when it came, was gently playful.
“I see that I must not take you at your own valuation.”
The want of an answering smile, and the averting of his eyes, told her that the topic was not a gratifying one to him; that here was one of the men—almost unknown in her experience—who did not wish to talk about themselves; nor did she suspect that the gravity of his reception of her feeler was due to the slight sense of discomfort that one of her late carefully prepared sentences had produced. Why did she tell that unnecessary lie about Felicity’s admiration of Camilla’s work? She must have known that it was one!
He was glad, and Bonnybell was not as sorry as she would have expected to be, when the door opened to admit Camilla. The latter was shortly followed by men-servants, who laid out a teatable—an evident survival from the, to Bonnybell, incredible period of Mrs. Tancred’s girlhood; and Jock, ceasing to make a fool of himself on the hearthrug, and knowing that the hour of pet-dog biscuits had come, trotted confidently up to the board. He did not know that in the unprecedented novelty whom he had carefully sniffed over, and finally acquiesced in, lay an enemy to his own peace.
“You do not mean to say that you let him have it for nothing?” cried Bonnybell, in animated remonstrance. “We never allowed our little Mimi to eat a mouthful without barking for it.”
“Was ‘little Mimi’ your dog?” asked Camilla, in a voice that, though carping at the silliness of the name, had yet a ring of true fellow-feeling in it.
“Yes, she was such a beauty. I do not know what Sir Alg—one of Cl—my mother’s friends—did not give for her.”
Thorny is the path of virtuous conversation. People did not talk of Sir Algernon, and she was within an ace of Claire-ing her departed parent again, and her audience was strictly silent; it expected her to go on, so she evidently must continue her narrative, trusting in whatever parody of Providence had hitherto guided her steps to steer her safely through it.
“Mimi was twin-sister to the little dog that always drove in the Bois with Lolotte, sitting up in the victoria beside her, and dressed in the same colours and jewels as her mistress.”
There was a slight sound as of somebody gasping, then a pause, then a question.