Again her tom-cat smile reappeared, and she went off wearing it, when she at length left him to his belated toilet.
“You have heard, I suppose?”
“Heard what?”
It was disingenuous of Edward to pretend ignorance of the subject of Bonnybell’s question, but though guiltily conscious of an acute curiosity as to the criminal’s version of the story, a grave doubt as to whether it would not be the wiser course to let such sleeping dogs lie, drove him into as much prevarication as was implied by his “Heard what?”
“If you have not heard, I think it would be a relief to me to tell you, if you would allow me.”
“Oh, but I have heard!” he answered rather precipitately, uncomfortably aware that he was giving himself away by admitting knowledge of what he had a moment ago feigned ignorance of.
The scene was the morning-room after dinner on the same day. From that dinner Camilla had been summoned away by a messenger of ill from the village. She had left that small and rigidly plain portion of her own excellent food which she ever allowed herself without hesitation or regret, and was still absent, now that the tea-table was being placed in its usual position. Edward had not long rejoined his guest, who was sitting rather out of sight behind a screen, from beyond which her voice came low and plaintive. The few glances at her that he had allowed himself during dinner had told him—or he thought so—that her eyelids were a little reddened, though not to the extent of disfigurement. “I am one of the few people who can cry becomingly,” was her own dispassionate dictum, “and it will be disarming to look as if I had wept, and I am sure”—the waif feeling returning in some strength—“it will come easily enough; no one can ever have had better reason to do it.”
“I was silly enough to hope I had made a good impression.”
“I, too, quite thought so,” he answered mournfully, touched by the gentle humility of her confession of mistake.
“I dare say I should have continued in my fool’s paradise if Miss Aylmer had not persuaded her mother to come and complain of me.”