“What do you think about going out?”
She glanced through the window. It would have been much more consonant with her views of the right way of spending Sunday to have sat blowing delicate clouds through her nose and picking his brains over the smoking-room fire, but that was a blue rose.
“What do you recommend?” she asked with a smile that looked persuadable.
“Isn’t it rather rash ever to recommend anything to anybody?”
Mr. Tancred’s propositions were mostly put interrogatively. He had not enough value for his own opinion to assert anything with dogmatism, having fifteen years earlier set up so robust a self-contempt as still showed no signs of wearing out.
“Be rash, then.” She was still smiling anxiously, divided between a lurking fear of mud and a horror of solitude.
“I wonder,” he suggested, still tentatively, and eying doubtfully the towny elegance of her garb, “whether you would care to walk with me as far as what we call the Dower House?”
“Is that where you keep your dowagers?” she asked playfully, but with an inward misgiving as to the proposed treat being “good enough.”
“It is where Camilla’s people used to keep them,” replied he, with that careful dissevering of himself, which Bonnybell so often afterwards noticed, from his wife’s possessions; “but as she is the last of the Tancreds, it will not be needed again.”
“The last of the Tancreds!” repeated she, with an accent of surprise. “I thought that Tancred was your name?”