Bonnybell had not the generosity of Camilla, and the immediate effect of her words upon Miss Aylmer’s ally and supposed admirer filled her with a sincere and tranquil joy.
“Miss Aylmer!” he echoed with an unmistakable start. “Catherine Aylmer! Oh, you surely must be mistaken.”
For answer, he saw a lovely little dusky head shaking itself sadly from its seclusion.
“She was perfectly right—oh, do not think I am blaming her!—quite, quite right, if she thought I was doing her sister harm; but oh, it is all such a different milieu from what I have been used to! If you knew, if you could only guess, how utterly at sea I feel among you all.”
There was something in the forlorn and well-justified pathos in her tone that might have melted a harder heart, and affected a nature less sensitive to others’ sufferings than Edward’s. He rose out of the armchair into which he had tiredly let himself down on his first entrance, as if seeking relief from his emotion in a change of posture. (“Good Heavens!” thought she, “I have overdone it. I have been too affecting. I thought I was safe with him. One is never safe.”) But he only went and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the garlands and grouped figures of the Adams chimney-piece, and took a coat-tail pensively under each arm.
“I am afraid that it was inevitable at first,” he said at length with a faltering reassurance in his voice. “The plunge was too sudden; but things will right themselves in time, don’t you think?”
His manner was always tentative, and he had never in his life felt less sure of the truth of any proposition than of the one he was now advancing.
“Do you really think so?” she asked, once more relieved and astonished that her new fears of his harbouring purposes of enterprise were as baseless as her former ones. She added hesitatingly. “You could help me a good deal if you would.”
“I!”
“If—when you saw that I was going to make one of my blunders, you would make some sign to me to stop.”