She acquiesced gratefully. Any change from her late forlorn condition of being thrown on her own resources must be for the better, and if she pretended to be interested in his old daubs, she might be more likely to retain his company.
They had reached the morning-room, and Tancred held back the heavy curtain from the nearest window, to let a larger measure of the niggard daylight of a November afternoon fall upon the object he was exhibiting.
“That is Sir Thomas Overbury; it was given by him to a cousin of his who married an ancestor of my wife’s. That”—indicating another portrait—“is Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. There is a grim irony in hanging them cheek by jowl, isn’t there?”
“Very grim,” returned she, and called inwardly upon her gods for help in enabling her to disguise how little she knew why it was grim, or why there was any question of irony.
“And that is Somerset’s wife”—pointing to a good female portrait by Van Somers. “I always think she has such a deceptive face; one would never read her story in it, would one?”
“Never.”
This was perfectly true, since Bonnybell had not the foggiest notion of what the illustrious murderess’s story was.
“It was taken when she was Lady Essex.”
“Oh yes, of course.”
The “of course” was redundant, and a mistake. It made him look at her in slight surprise, and with that look dawned upon him the fact that never before had Miss Ransome “heard tell” of any one of the three notorious personages to whose effigies he had just introduced her.