“Lisa!” cried Bonnybell, hardily putting out her hand to stroke the little angry, faithful head. “Is Lisa still alive?”
There was an affectionate inflexion in her voice, which Edward, though listening with one whole ear to his hostess, caught, and recognized as an unknown note. Art was non-existent for her, Nature invisible to her, but she understood and appreciated dogs.
“And why should not she be alive, pray?” inquired Lisa’s owner, sharply, her sensitiveness about her dog’s age being even superior to that which she manifested with regard to her own. Then, with a reverting to her original key, “And what, in the name of Fortune, my dear child, brings you here?”
The little buzz of greeting was over, followed by a momentary silence among the rest of the party. Not a soul in the room but must have noticed the exaggerated emphasis on the personal pronoun, and have drawn the inevitable inference that to meet Miss Ransome in a respectable house was an experience that must take away any one’s breath. The wings of the not yet seen Toby were already spread for flight. Who could have anticipated that the egg of that bright prospect would be addled almost before it was laid? These thoughts were coursing through Bonnybell’s brain, even while she was murmuring her answer in a tone calculated in its hesitating meekness to deprecate any further showing up.
“I am staying with Mr. and Mrs. Tancred. They are good enough to let me pay them a little visit.”
The rejoinder was a rather discomfited “Humph!” a humph which had no need to have any light thrown upon it for the rest of the company, but which was interpreted only later to Bonnybell, when she learned that Camilla had never shown any sign of a knowledge of Lady Tennington’s presence in the neighbourhood, nor, large as was her circumference despite French corsets and massage, any appearance of seeing her, when they had met on neutral ground.
There was a slight pause; the matron digesting the unintended snub, and the maid quakingly asking herself what she could say next best calculated to stop the flow of Flora’s reminiscences! Rescue came from an unexpected quarter.
“Miss Ransome is very much understating our hopes,” said Edward, in a slow voice of measured courtesy, through which any one who knew him well could trace some sort of smothered exasperation piercing; “my wife and I count upon her to stay with us indefinitely.”
Had he already caught from his young protégée the faculty of glib lying? He knew perfectly that he was saying the thing that was not; that there was nothing in the world which Camilla ambitioned less than to have her present guest as a permanent inmate; but the impulse of partisanship of bucklering one so exposed to the world’s cruel shafts conquered the lifelong instincts of veracity in an almost invariably truthful man. He was rather shocked when he realized what he had done; yet he did not repent. His own espousing her cause would be worse than useless to her, but his wife’s, with her fifty years of almost awful rectitude behind her, was a name to conjure with.
Flora gave a little chuckle—not ill-natured, for she was never ill-natured, but helplessly tickled at the idea of the rigid Pharisee who had cut her for thirty years taking to her bony bosom the progeny of poor Claire—poor Claire, of all people!