“You are exaggerating,” interrupted Welsh; “you have, I admit, acted like a donkey—excuse the expression, no other is as forcible and as true—but I find no such irretrievable mischief done as you suppose. Fortunately the mistake has been corrected at once. If you will go home, or to Lady Woodhead—”
“Lady Hermione Woodhead,” corrected Arminell.
“Or to Lady Hermione Woodhead—all will be well. What might have been a catastrophe is averted.”
“No,” answered Arminell, “all will not be well. Excuse me if I flatly contradict you. There is something else you have not reckoned on, but which I must take into my calculations. I shall never forget what I have done, never forgive myself for having embittered the last moments of my dear father’s life, never for having thought unworthily of him, and let him see that he had lost my esteem. If I were to return home, now or later from my aunt’s house, I could not shake off the sense of self-reproach, of self-loathing which I now feel. There is one way, and one way only, in which I can recover my self-respect and peace of mind.”
“And that is—?”
“By not going home.”
“Well—go to your aunt’s.”
“I should be there for a month, and after that must return to Orleigh. No—that is not possible. Do you not see that several reasons conspire against my taking that course?”
“Pray let me know them.”
“In the first place, it is certain to have leaked out that I ran away from home. My conduct will be talked about and commented on in Orleigh, in the county. It will become part of the scandal published in the society papers, and be read and laughed over by the clerks and shop-girls who take in these papers, whose diet it is. Everywhere, in all classes, the story will be told how the Honourable Arminell Inglett, only daughter of Giles, tenth Baron Lamerton of Orleigh, and his first wife, the Lady Lucy Hele, daughter of the Earl of Anstey, had eloped with the son of a mining captain, the tutor to her half-brother, and how that they were discovered together in a little inn in Bloomsbury.”