“Then I hope we shall see something of each other,” she said bravely, ignoring her own relations, or rather want of relations, with the Tancred family. “I will send the motor over for you. You used to like motoring in the days when poor Al——”
She broke off. Not even she, with all her social courage and no character worth speaking of to lose, dared pronounce more than the first half of the submerged one’s name.
Before Bonnybell could frame a judicious answer to this discomfiting invitation, her hostess came to her aid. She had not caught Miss Ransome’s name with any precision, mumbled as names always are mumbled by English people on introduction, and perhaps even more so on the part of Edward than was usually the case, from the consciousness that it was not a patronymic warranted to ensure a welcome for its owner. Mrs. Aylmer only saw a remarkably pretty and evidently very young girl looking confused and miserable, though trying with the greatest civility to hide it under the avalanche of Lady Tennington’s questions and invitations. Of course, a decent girl could not possibly be allowed, and evidently had no wish, to accept the latter; and, being a warm-hearted woman with a motherly heart going out to the slender black figure standing to be baited by the shocking old demi-rep, whom she so unaccountably seemed to know, the hostess hastened to extricate her from the tight place in which the poor child found herself.
“I wonder,” she said, looking kindly at the young stranger, “whether you would care to join the schoolroom tea? My children like it so very much better than ours.”
“I should love it!” replied Bonnybell, fervently, throwing an eyebeam of unmistakable gratitude out of her enormous eyes at her saviour, and thinking with intense inward self-congratulation upon how admirably in the teeth of hideous difficulties she must have played the jeune fille this time. Oh, if she could only keep it up! If only she could have seen Flora Tennington safe into her motor before her own exit! could—failing that—have had any trust in Flora’s reticence!
It remained to be seen what the schoolroom had to show. Its possibilities, at all events, could not include another Flora, nor could any of the disreputable men whose images rose with such unwelcome vividness upon Miss Ransome’s mind, recalled by the sight of Lady Tennington, by any possibility have crossed the scholastic threshold on whose other side a governess with a pince-nez and an assured manner, and a tall diffident girl in a pigtail presently greeted her. The third person’s salutation could scarcely be called a greeting, as it consisted merely in his standing up, stopping eating quince jam, and looking thoroughly annoyed at having to do either. The governess revealed herself on presentation as Miss Barnacre, and the leggy young Miss as Meg.
In the case of the third person, presentation, though it took place duly, was superfluous. If induction had not, intuition would have taught Miss Ransome to recognize in the sullen consumer of interrupted jam the magnet that had guided her tender feet through the puddly park of a November twilight. He conquered his indignation at her intrusion enough to set her a chair at the command of Miss Barnacre, who followed up the attention by asking her a series of patronizing questions, adapted to the intellect of a child of four years. Miss Barnacre was of the new type of instructress, that type which sometimes makes its employer privily regret its down-trodden predecessor, victim to melancholy and indigestion; that new type which, fortified by all the rites of Girton, condescends to the parents of its pupils, chaffs and lectures their brothers, and inspires adoring awed friendships in their elder sisters; that type which differs as much from the early Victorian one as does the pert houri in “bang” and streamers who commands at our sick-bed side from the classic figure of Mrs. Gamp.
Bonnybell responded with meek submissiveness to the elementary catechism so glaringly adapted to her comprehension, and consoled herself for the time wasted upon the governess by the philosophic reflection that she might gain more by being seen and heard in the case of so obvious a cub as Toby, than by being brought into more direct colloquy with him.
Miss Barnacre interrupted her own questionings at last, to give a brusque order to the young man to ring the bell, and it was now the turn of the eldest daughter of the house.
“Lady Tennington is an old friend of yours?” she asked quite pleasantly, and with a curiosity that was well within the limits of the courteous and permissible; yet in which the young stranger divined an inevitable surprise.