Upon Flora’s lap sat the little old dachshund Lisa, down whose throat Harrington was trying to drive a pill. By holding her mouth tight shut, and stroking her throat, the object was supposed to have been, after many previous failures, attained. The fallacy of the deduction was proved an hour later by the pill being found intact on the front stairs, showing that the wily Lisa had, after all, bested her physicians; but for the present, lulled in a false security, Lisa’s mistress was able to remember her visitor’s presence.
“Wasn’t it fortunate that Harrington should have happened to be at the station just in time to see your old monster get into the train? I said to myself, ‘Now is my time.’ I had been puzzling my head as to how I was going to get at you. I could not come after you. You know I am tolerably facile à vivre, but I cannot stand that old woman.”
Truth is truth, even if inverted, and Bonnybell did not think it necessary to point out that in this case it was standing on its head; since, in point of fact, it was “that old woman” who had never been able to “stand” Lady Tennington.
“I had scarcely a word with you at the Aylmers’,” continued Flora, raising her rather bulky form from the floor by the aid of Harrington, whom she immediately afterwards sent out of the room. “You were packed off to Meg and that odious prig of a governess for fear that I should corrupt your mind, I suppose.”
She laughed, both with cosmetic-ed lips and with eyes that, though brazenly bistered, were jolly and good-natured, at the humour of such a thing being possible; and Bonnybell laughed too, though with a surprised sense of annoyance at the unlimited knowledge of evil attributed to her.
“I corrupted theirs instead,” she replied, with a humorous gloom.
“The governess’s and Meg’s?” with an accent of delighted interest. “Oh, how it must have improved them!”
As she spoke, she held out an expensive and floridly coronetted cigarette-case to the girl, who pounced upon it as the camel upon a desert pool.
“Oh, how delicious! how I have longed and thirsted for one! Savory?”
“Yes, I always stick to them.”