This time the hearer’s shudder was a shudder indeed.
“You liked that?”
“It was no question of liking,” she answered, with a lightning-quick realization that she had made a false step, and that for the future “Sir Algy” had better remain in the extreme background of her conversation. “I had to go; Claire would have been dreadfully hurt if I had objected.”
There was a moment’s pause. He must brace himself to the effort, odious and anomalous as it was, to tutor her.
“Would you mind—I must apologize a thousand times for my presumption in making the suggestion—but would you mind not speaking of Lady Ransome by her Christian name? I do not mind it in the least myself”—yielding to the relief of an emphatic assertion—“but it might shock some of these strait-laced people down here. I am not sure”—very reluctantly—“that my wife would like it.”
“I am sure she would not,” replied the object of this rebuke, with a great candour, which would have disarmed her admonisher, if he had ever been armed. “In fact, I saw it by her manner last night. Of course, I ought not to call my mother ‘Claire,’ but it slipped out. The habit of a lifetime, you know. Well, ‘C’est plus fort que moi!’”
“Such a long lifetime, too!” returned he, with a gentle mocking of her absurd air of longevity.
“I should have been more on my guard with Mrs. Tancred,” continued she, in anxious explanation; “but with you I fancied it did not matter.”
He found a rejoinder to this speech difficult. He ought to have conveyed to her that he had no wish to be set on any different plane of intimacy with her from his wife, nor the least intention of being drawn into conniving behind Camilla’s back at what he knew that she disapproved. But long before he had found, even approximately, a form into which to cast this necessary snub, they had reached their destination. The church, standing on a little eminence above the slow midland river that slid through the park, was, from its small size and original destination, rather a chapel to the great house than a parish church.
“Is the music good? and do we come out before the sermon?” asked his charge, whispering.