“You thought I was lost!” cried her little voice in trepidating pleasure. “You came to look for me! How more than kind!”
“I am afraid that I did not even know you were out,” he answered, stepping hastily out of the patch of darkness and throwing away the end—or a good deal more than the end—of his cigarette. Both actions seemed to her unnecessary and undesirable. She commented only upon the last.
“Please don’t!” she pleaded eagerly. “You know that I was brought up upon cigarettes—I mean, of course, upon their smell. You do not know how I love it!”
The Heimweh in her tone shocked and startled him. Heimweh! Good Heavens, for what a Heim!
“Do not walk quite so fast,” she said, entreatingly. “I want, if you will let me, to get right with you. I know that I have been all wrong since Sunday.”
He slackened his pace—as what else could he do, so besought?—but it was with an unwillingness that she divined through his civil acquiescence; and he did not answer quite immediately. To deny that she had been “wrong with him” since Sunday would be to take a leaf out of that Liar’s Book, of which he had already begun to be afraid that she was a steady peruser; to assent would be certain to be followed by a re-opening of the casus belli, and there was nothing in the world that he wished less. To refuse to listen to the explanation, which it was but too evident that she had invented and was bent on uttering, would be to give it importance. He tried to carry the thing off lightly.
“My memory refuses to go back as far as Sunday. This is Thursday. Let us start a new reckoning from to-day.”
But Bonnybell was not to be put off. She got a little nearer to him, partly in real anxiety, partly because she reckoned upon her face as her best ally in the work of propitiation, and in this scant light proximity was indispensable for him to feel its value.
“You were quite under a misapprehension the other night, when you were so displeased with me,” she began, with rapid deprecation. “Is it likely that, friendless as I am, I should want to alienate my best—a—a—well-wisher?” (She had hesitated over the last word, as if her humility had replaced by it the more presuming “friend.”) “I never meant to say or imply that Mrs. Tancred was really old.” (Oh, Miss Ransome!) “Fifty! what is fifty nowadays? Many women of fifty do not look a day over five-and-thirty. With a little touching up, Mrs. Tancred would not look a day over thirty.”
He would give his ears to stop her. There seemed to him something at once shocking and ludicrous, firstly in her brazen mendacity, and secondly in the indelicacy of her determination to discuss his wife; but she ran on so fast in the eagerness of self-exculpation that he could not find a chink in which to put a protest.