“I could not help overhearing what you were saying to Meg.”
The great eyes opened wider in a helpless lack of comprehension, and there was an air of painful puzzledom about the delicate brows knit in the effort to recall any utterance that could have given offence.
“What—I said—to Meg?”
Happen what might, she would not make it easier for this squinting prude, who had given her away. It was in these harsh terms that her own distress of mind made her qualify the very nearly invisible cast in Miss Aylmer’s left eye.
“You were telling her things that I thought—that I knew—my mother would think she had better not hear.”
“I am very, very sorry!”—in a low key of meek apology that was yet completely at sea as to the ground of that apology. “But what sort of things?”
“You told her that Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of Waddy.”
The colour died out of Bonnybell’s cheek, a feat which not even she would have been able to perform, but which a very real dismay executed for her. Good-bye, Toby! Good-bye, probably the very roof that now covered her! Here lies would avail her nothing. Here innocence, penitence, and brass must go hand-in-hand; and it was too likely that not even that trio would be strong enough to drag her out of the swamp into which she had fallen neck-deep.
“But he does!” she answered, her startled-fawn air and her apparent fifteen years giving a piquancy, if any of her present hearers were in a condition to appreciate it, to her scandalous words. “I thought that everybody knew it. Why, people always ask them to their houses together; quite good people do.”
There was a horrid silence, broken at first only by Miss Aylmer’s long breath of relief at the accomplishment of a hateful duty, and its immediately following justification. To the eye of faith, Camilla might have been almost seen lifting her bludgeon. It fell.