“Your loving
“Flora.
“P.S.—You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
Miss Ransome’s decision must be immediate. The expectant footman was still at her elbow awaiting orders. She threw her cap over the mill.
“I shall be ready in ten minutes.”
The decision—given the deep disgrace from which she had so lately emerged—sounded like madness; but a streak of reason ran through it. Her host and hostess had announced their intention of returning by a later train than the one that usually brought Edward; the servants would, in all probability, not tell upon her. Camilla’s own lifelong maid, a young lady of fifty-five, had, shortly before Bonnybell arrived, yielded to the urgencies of a bridegroom, become too pressing to be longer resisted, to crown by marriage an engagement of thirty years. Her present attendant was a young person whom she had employed because nobody else would, and in order to make her a character. But what decided Miss Ransome to take the plunge was the postscript, “You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
“An old friend!” This by itself would act as a deterrent. It must be a man, since Claire and she never had any women friends after Flora dropped them, and of the men who formed her circle, there was not one concerning whom her most ardent wish was never to hear of or meet him again. But “a new friend!” Who could it be but Toby?
It was, perhaps, a stretch of language to give that name to a person, the sole evidence of whose meriting it was that he looked black when she entered the room, remained churlishly silent during the few minutes of their joint occupancy of it, and left it with a bang of discourteous haste to escape her. But, at all events, it was well worth trying, and in twenty minutes from her first reception of the proposition she was flying along between the tree-stems of the park, on her way to accept it.
The motor was, to her relief, a brougham. To arrive touzled and stained—and she had not a proper motoring costume with her—would be to prejudice her chance of success at the outset. She must be pretty before all things. Whether her prettiness was to be further ornamented by a sweet innocence or a daring raciness of conversation must depend upon what a further acquaintance with Toby’s tastes and methods might reveal. If he were an habitué of Flora’s, the latter of the two alternatives was the one more likely to please. But her deep-seated and universal distrust of man—falsified though it had been in the case of Edward by a fortnight’s acquaintance—made her finally resolve to temper her raciness, if she was racy, with caution.
Arrived, after a quarter of an hour’s whirl, Bonnybell found Flora in a hot room, crammed with flowers and bric-à-brac, whose very atmosphere brought back, with a rush of startled repulsion, to the girl’s memory the atmosphere that she had breathed through her own childhood and early youth. During the last period of her mother’s life it had been further improved by the continual perfume of champagne and drugs; but the present one, though free from these ingredients, was like enough to make her realize how far she had travelled from what it represented, and to wish that she had not come, particularly as no vestige of a redeeming Toby showed on the naked horizon.
Flora was too much occupied at the moment of her guest’s arrival to spare time for any greeting. She was sitting on the floor, as was Harrington, the broken-down gentleman who was coeval with Flora in Bonnybell’s acquaintance with that lady; the broken-down gentleman who, beginning by being her lover, had ended by being her major-domo.