“I cannot at this moment remember who Felicity’s favourite pope is?”
“She did not generally take me with her; she sent me with Tom—Mr. Glanville—instead.”
Bonnybell did not think it necessary to explain that towards the close of her unluckily shortened stay Felicity had deemed it advisable to alter this arrangement. Doubts such as she had already felt with regard to what the Tancreds knew or did not know of the Hill Street fiasco hurried her into a well-sounding expression of opinion.
“I like going to church, of all things.”
The turn of the phrase amused him, and, against his intention, he showed it a little.
“Is it a new sensation?”
She repented the slip, but her hearer, glanced sideways at in fleeting apprehension, looked so lenient, that she took heart.
“We—Claire and I—were not generally up in time to go to church in the morning, and we mostly played bridge in the afternoon.”
Mr. Tancred gave a slight shudder of thankfulness—if a shudder can ever be thankful—that this glimpse into the young stranger’s past had been revealed to him, instead of to his wife. To his thankfulness was added a prick of conscience, reminding him that he ought to chide the girl for her glib use of the forbidden Christian name. But he did not; and the civil, unrebuking attention with which he listened deceived her into fresh admissions.
“Sometimes Sir Algy took us down on his motor to Richmond or Maidenhead.”