Ah, now we are beginning to get at something more promising! Sir Frederick Milward!—a well-acred baronet, perhaps, or preferably an industrial millionaire, knighted for judicious hospitalities in high places.
“Is he nice?”
“Oh, fairly; but they are scarcely ever here. His wife is a neurotic; and the place—it is a dreary barrack at the best of times—is empty for ten months of the year.”
In profound discouragement, Miss Ransome desisted from her queries. What a disgusting neighbourhood; everybody married, eating gory gigots à l’eau, and breeding like rabbits!
At luncheon Mrs. Tancred took away her guest’s appetite for the moment by asking her what the sermon was about, but dealt more gently than might have been expected with her total inability to reply, letting her off with the ironical hope that she had enjoyed her nap, and adding with that habitual grim justice which sentenced herself as uncompromisingly as others—
“You might fairly ask why, if I wished to know, I did not myself go to hear it?”
“I should be very much interested if you cared to tell me,” replied the culprit, with meek untruthfulness.
“I do not think you would,” rejoined the other, bluntly. “Anyhow, I have a creed, though I am quite sure that you would not make head or tail of it.”
Bonnybell received with joyful acquiescence this unflatteringly couched reprieve from a lesson in theology; and without the least inward or outward murmur the announcement that Camilla would not be visible before teatime. Later on she learned that it was the prosecution of her mysterious cult that kept Mrs. Tancred in austere study and Stoic meditation through the long hours. Though her husband did not share in her solitary devotions, it at first looked as if he were going to be as invisible as she.
A sense of desperation laid hold of the young stranger on finding herself left alone, with the whole house, rich in artistic and historic interest, it is true, to range over, but with, in all probability, not a living soul to exchange a word with for two and a half mortal hours. She filched some violets and a tube-rose out of a vase, and pinned them upon her smart blackness, but she had to stand on tip-toe to get a good sight of herself in the beautiful Venetian mirror, evidently hung with a view to its own becomingness, not for the convenience of “rash gazers;” and the whole manœuvre, though she prolonged it by practising a variety of expressions that might come in useful by-and-by upon her face, did not occupy five minutes.