“Oh, nothing of any importance. I was only going to suggest that whatever shortcomings you may discover in this poor little creature—and I dare say there will be plenty of them” (he despised himself for the concession, which he knew to be a bid for his wife’s leniency)—“we must remember her antecedents; we must try to make allowances for her.”
She stood for a moment silent before him, her unbeautiful arms folded in her dull wrapper.
“Yes,” she answered dryly, yet assentingly. “Make allowances! It is a manufacture that for fifty years I have found phenomenally difficult; but you are right! one has no business to look for morals and manners in the Stews!”
He was used to the crudity of her phrases; yet now he turned with a quick movement towards the fire to hide the shudder that her old-fashioned vernacular, used in its present connection, caused him; but the accurate lyre-shaped clock on the chimney-piece above his head had ticked ten times before he could face his companion again with a controlled smile.
“And there is one thing, at all events, indisputably in her favour.”
“What?”
“Jock has taken a fancy to her.”
CHAPTER VI
As Miss Ransome was not aware of having made even the ally alluded to by Mr. Tancred overnight, it was with a very self-distrustful heart that next morning she appeared in the breakfast-room, to find her host and hostess waiting for her. It was one of the rules of Camilla’s old-fashioned code of politeness that it is as inadmissible to begin breakfast without a guest as to go in to dinner before he or she has appeared, and many a sleepy visitor had cursed this cruel civility.
Bonnybell had made what appeared to herself superhuman efforts to keep pace with the detestably unanimous clocks, that apparently, from every recess and landing-place in the house, admonished her of the flight of the minutes. For Claire and her daughter time had been not. Her apprenticeship in Hill Street had been neither long nor strict enough to uproot the habits of a lifetime; and though she had scamped her hair, and entirely omitted to underline her eyes, those eyes informed Bonnybell, on the authority of the relentlessly ticking accuser that faced her as she hurried in, that she was ten minutes late.