He thought it unlikely, but did not say so.
“Bonnybell!” continued she, derisively. “What a cruelly ironical name to inflict—‘Bonne et belle’—when she is probably neither the one nor the other!”
“Let us hope for the worst, at all events,” said he, gently caustic.
“Bonnybell! She was probably named after one of the two sham widowers’ racehorses.”
“I thought you calculated that she dated from the pre-widower period.”
“Ay, so she must have done. Then she was named after one of Lord Ransome’s hounds. If you remember, he kept the Mudshire for several years before a barbed-wire fence broke his worthless neck for him.”
Tancred had known Lord Ransome a little; and the question crossed his mind as to whether it was worth while saying that his neck was not more valueless than his neighbours’. He decided that it was not. If you possess a wife with very decided opinions and a very trenchant mode of expressing them, why not let her enjoy them in peace? You may, at least, make her these trifling amends for the irreparable injury you have done her.
“If we refuse the girl,” he began slowly, after an interval spent in cogitation by two of the party, and in muffled remonstrances at the unusual delay in brewing his slopbasin of weak tea on the part of the third—“if we refuse the girl, what is the alternative?”
“None, apparently, but the streets.”
“Poor little devil!”