CHAPTER VII
After that, being a merciful man, Edward let her get off the historico-artistic gridiron, upon which he had been innocently grilling her. He showed her no more pictures, nor, indeed, anything else except his smoking-room, in which she exhibited a lively, and this time perfectly unfeigned interest, and where her intelligent inquiries as to the brand of cigars favoured by him, and her discriminating knowledge of the subject in contrast to her abysmal ignorance of the former ones, taught him that hers had not been a past of mere cigarettes. She had nourished a faint hope that he might have invited her to share a friendly whiff there and then, but it was clearly not to be. Instead, he gently ejected her. “Of course, the old camel would smell it,” said the disappointed young creature, inwardly feeling a sensible relief in this ingeniously insulting play upon the name of her latest benefactress.
Edward had escorted her back to the very spot where he had found her, opposite the calumniated Dierick Bouts; and with despair she saw, or thought she saw, in his eye an imminent intention of leaving her. What could she do to arrest him? Rush at once into some entanglingly interesting subject which would rob him of that wish to escape which it was so incomprehensible that he could ever have nourished? Ask him why he married Camilla?
She was saved from a remedy which would certainly in its results have proved worse than the disease, by the object of her solicitude.
“I am afraid,” he said, looking first compassionately at her and then rather helplessly round the room, as if in puzzled search among its wealth of beautiful objects and inviting books for something capable of amusing her—“I am afraid that you will be very dull all by yourself.”
The inevitable civil falsehood—inevitable, at least, to the ever-lying Bonnybell, followed.
“Oh no, I love being by myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really; that is to say”—in terror that he might be obtuse enough to believe her—“that is to say, I love it generally.”
The implication that she did not love it on this particular occasion was so piteously apparent, that humanity forced him to throw a rope to her.