“She is a good child, but she is a great baby for her age,” replied he, in a tone which she heard to be touched with surprise. “I should not have thought”—reviewing in his mind certain choice flowers of his present companion’s speech—“that you and she would have much in common.”
“A great baby for her age!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a key of relieved enlightenment. “Ah, that accounts for it, then.”
“For the surprise she showed—the ignorance of such very ordinary things—things that everybody knows.”
His heart quailed. “What sort of things?”
But Miss Ransome was all at once on her guard. It might be one’s misfortune to be shown up; but to show one’s self up was a sin against common sense not to be committed by any one even moderately wide-awake.
“I cannot recollect any particular instance,” she answered with apparent carelessness; “it was only a general impression, and I dare say quite a wrong one; but, anyhow”—returning to safe ground—“they are all darlings, and you are very lucky to have them so near. I do not say anything about their luck!” she added in a witching lower key.
All the same, she was relieved that, when the small family was reseated round the supper-table, spread with enticing cold foods, in Sunday leniency to the admirably treated and very much underworked servants, Camilla put her through no catechism as to her afternoon’s experiences. The note of alarm in Edward’s voice had made Miss Ransome resolve to be wholly reticent as to the slight contretemps about stupid Meg; and beyond a message sent by Mrs. Aylmer to his wife and faithfully delivered by Edward, to the effect that a day’s shopping in London would prevent her fulfilling a promise to visit Mrs. Tancred on the morrow afternoon, the Dower House remained for some good while unmentioned.
To Bonnybell it would have been an unmixed blessing that this silence should last through the evening. To pick Camilla’s brains upon any subject would require the courage and dexterity of a lion-tamer, and by a series of delicate feelers, veiled suggestions, and innocent-looking suppositions on the dusky homeward walk, Bonnybell had wiled out of Edward all the information about the Aylmer family that it was really of any consequence to her to know, viz. that through the bequest of a distant kinsman the suave Toby was independent, and at the death of a decrepit great-uncle would be more independent still of his father. She had also learnt that he was called a woman-hater; but, so far from being daunted by this information she, put her own encouraging gloss upon it. “A woman-hater! Pooh! that only means that he is bored with respectable women; and though I am respectable, and mean to remain so, I am not sure that I look it.”
In this soothed and hopeful mood Miss Bonnybell sat down to supper. Not for long, however, did she remain quietly seated. Since from the Sunday supper servants were banished, and that on Edward devolved the whole onus of handing chaudfroids and pouring claret, an instant desire to help him sent her circling round the table too. He had rather that she did not. It gave him the same sense of superannuation as if she had offered to help him into his greatcoat, but after one gentle protest he desisted, fearing to hurt her feelings. Camilla’s sarcastic-sounding observation that, decrepit as Edward looked, he was capable of waiting upon two people, had its sting taken out by the lenient smile that accompanied it, and that seemed almost to approve of the eager rejoinder—