“Did you get much out of him?”—in a tone tinged with incredulity.
“It was not so much what he said”—since the young gentleman in question had never opened his mouth except to admit jam, this was strictly true—“as his looks; such a nice, frank, straightforward English boy.” Men are jealous and grudging about other men’s praises, and it is more than likely that this encomium would never be repeated to its object; but, on the other hand, it might, and the attempt cost nothing.
“And you found plenty to talk about to them all?” returned he, going circuitously round his own alarm, and thinking that he might as well know the worst. He could not see her face, but he heard a slight hesitating catch in her breath.
“The governess—Miss Barnacre, is she?—monopolized the conversation a good deal; she talked very brilliantly, but I was not quite up in the subjects she mentioned. I think”—very tentatively—“that I was a little afraid of her.”
“A little?” repeated he, with much emphasis and less of doubtful suggestion than was generally the case in his utterances.
“Oh, you are afraid of her too, then!” cried Bonnybell, with an accent of joyful relief, but added, reverting cautiously to her rule of uttering no opinion about her new acquaintances that might not handsomely be repeated to its objects, “Of course, I saw what a treasure she must be to Mrs. Aylmer.”
“Did you?”
Tact told her that her praise of the detestable Barnacre had reached—perhaps a little exceeded—the limits of his power of swallowing, and she desisted gladly.
“And the girls, Catherine and Meg, had not they a chance of getting a word in?”
“Not very much”—rather slowly, as her thoughts reverted not quite comfortably to the sudden door shut upon her budding friendship with the younger Miss Aylmer. “I saw most, perhaps, of Meg. What a darling she is!”