But Camilla was not one of those wives who tactfully pick and choose the moments for imparting bad news. It would never have occurred to her that ill tidings told at night might probably rob the recipient of sleep, and that it would therefore be better to defer them till the morning. Such a reticence would have seemed to her to argue a want of moral courage on the part of both narrator and hearer. If anything untoward occurred to herself she wished to be told it at once, no matter whether she was sick or well, waking or sleeping; and she did as she would be done by.
“Miss Bonnybell has surpassed herself this time.”
“What has she done?” cried he, forgetting his pretence of not knowing to whom his wife was alluding, with a great heightening of his sense of out-of-tuneness, made up of fear of what he was going to hear and of exasperation with himself for minding so much what he ought to mind so little.
“Marian Aylmer and Catherine have been here to-day,” said Camilla, not falling into the procrastinating weakness which had been shown by the ladies alluded to, but going straight to the point.
“I thought Mrs. Alymer had an engagement in London?”
“So she had in the afternoon; but they came in the morning.” She paused, as if to let him absorb this fact, pregnant with significance of something abnormal and monstrous. “They came to make a formal complaint against”—“your protégée” was on the very edge of her lips, but perhaps some sudden impression of how fagged he looked prompted her at the very last moment to alter it to—“our guest.”
“What for?”
In his heart he knew that he was not very much surprised, recollecting the relieved tone of Bonnybell’s “That accounts for it!” in answer to his remark upon Meg Aylmer’s backwardness, on their homeward walk. He felt at the time with misgiving that it would be wiser not to ask what “it” was. Well, he was going to learn now.
“For corrupting Meg’s mind.”
“I did not know that Meg had a mind to corrupt,” he answered unwisely, and, with an instant awareness of his slip, added, “Miss Ransome must have been very quick about it, for she could not have been more than half an hour in the schoolroom, and the great and good Barnacre was there on guard all the time.”