“It is not that I am not most anxious to learn. Oh, do not misunderstand me on that point! I have had enough of misunderstandings the last three dreadful days.”
Through the dusk he could see that her little black orphaned hands were tightly clasping each other, but he did not know that their anxious grip was a matter of calculation, nor that the penitent before him was saying to herself, “I am really very touching. The odd thing is that I am rather touched myself too.”
“If I thought I should ever do her any credit,” she continued, inserting a slight quaver into her tone; “but I have no natural aptitude for learning, and I am beginning so late. I cannot bear to think of what uphill work it will be for her.”
“That is an aspect of the question that will never present itself to her,” replied he, with what might be a shade of dryness in his voice; and the anxious Bonnybell divined that she was not even yet quite on the right tack.
(“I am overdoing it; I must not be too angelic. He is beginning to suspect that I embroider a little.”)
“Perhaps it was one word for Mrs. Tancred and two for myself”—allowing a tinge of self-rallying playfulness to creep into her words. “Perhaps I am only a born dunce, and want an excuse for remaining one.”
The unvarnished truth of her last sentence did her far more service with her hearer, as she in a moment felt, than the high varnish of her preceding ones.
“There are worse things in life than a dunce,” he answered, in a tone of unmistakable indulgence, and for which he contemned himself.
“Then we are friends again,” rejoined she, softly sliding out, with carefully studied impulsiveness, four little humble fingers and a hesitating thumb to meet his clasp.
“Yes,” he answered, accepting her hand with a frank comradeship, in which even her expert palm could detect no attempt at a squeeze, “by all means let us be friends; only”—with a return to his habitually tentative, non-assertive manner—“would not it be a good plan for us to remember that even in the most intimate friendships there are reticences?”