Furnished with this explanation, Miss Ransome’s eyes reverted to the object of an admiration which had originally been more polite than founded on conviction, and she chid herself inwardly for her stupidity in not at once recognizing that in the large-featured girl, whose sandy hair not even a courtly limner had been able to transmute into gold, lay the germ of the grim woman sitting beneath it. It was not yet too late to repair her error.
“Of course, I saw at a glance who it was,” she exclaimed glibly.
No comment followed this brave assertion, and its utterer thought it safer to go boldly on; but the want of conviction that she felt her statement had carried flurried her into a question from which her more deliberate judgment would have refrained.
“Is there no portrait of you, no pendant to this one?”
The query was addressed and referred to the host, but it was the hostess who answered.
“At the time that picture was painted, Edward was exactly six years old. There is a difference of fifteen years between us.”
A slight writhe upon Mr. Tancred’s part witnessed to the failure of his skin to have hardened itself against what yet must be a daily pin-prick, and Bonnybell, good-naturedly sorry for him, and still more concerned for herself at having floundered into so egregious a fault in taste, began a precipitate sentence which a look from Edward’s eyes converted into a for-ever unfinished fragment.
“No one would guess it!” was the complete form of the projected lie, but the phrase never got beyond its third word. In fact, Miss Ransome left the breakfast-table with not the slightest remorse indeed for the fibs, complete and inchoate, which she had perpetrated there, but with some misgiving as to their success.
It was contrary to what she would have expected, but yet the conviction came solidly home to her, as she pinned a veil with careful nicety over the chastened mournfulness and unchastened coquetry of her toque, that Camilla would be more easy to take in than Edward.
Miss Ransome was pinning on a veil at ten o’clock in the morning, not because her ejection had come thus early—though in her own opinion unlikelier things might have happened—but because it was Sunday morning, and she had been told that she was to walk to church with Mr. Tancred. There was apparently no question of Mrs. Tancred’s attending Divine Service.