CHAPTER II

“The last day, and almost the last hour! I am thoroughly sorry,” said Felicity, and she was nearly sure that she meant it.

“Sorry is a weak word to express what I feel!” is the heartfelt answer. “Where should I have been now, I should like to know, but for you and Mr. Glanville?”

“Where indeed!”

The speculation as to Bonnybell’s hypothetical whereabouts silenced both ejaculators for a moment or two, until a glance at the clock telling Mrs. Glanville that her typewriter would be back from luncheon in ten minutes, and that she herself would have to return to multifarious work in her business room after the same time limit, hurried her into new final tendernesses.

“You know how much I should have liked to keep you permanently.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course I do.”

Possibly the extreme fervour of this reassurance was due to a something, if faintly, yet uncomfortably self-suspicious, in the tone with which the hostess made a statement in whose truth that hostess yet almost believed.

“We have not much time, alas!”--leaving a branch of the subject dimly felt to be a little ticklish with some alacrity--“and I want, before you go, to give you a tiny _carte du pays_; you may find it useful.”

“It will be adding an item to your long, long list of kindnesses.”

“In the first place, my sister-in-law is much older than my brother.”

The hearer, with the black hat and inky gloves of imminent departure upon head and hand, lifted a tiny face of wistful interest in this first recorded fact from the _pouf_ at Felicity’s feet, upon which a slim body, limp with affection and regret, had thrown itself. She at once pensively commented upon it.

“If she makes up well, I dare say it does not show much.”

Mrs. Glanville broke into a horrified laugh. “Camilla make up! My dear child, wait till you see her.”

“I shall not have long to wait”--very lugubriously.

“Well, as you have not much time, I must hurry on. She is, as I say, much older than my brother.”

“Yes.”

“And she never could have been handsome.”

“Poor, poor fellow!” replied the girl, in a tone of the most good-hearted compassion. “But, no doubt, he has his consolations.”

Her hostess looked down upon the peculiarly innocent face at her knee with an expression in which the proportion of amusement to aghastness was considerably less than it had been at some of her _protégée’s_ utterances.

“Bonnybell,” she said, very gravely, “I really dare not ask what you mean!” Then reflecting that the few minutes left her would be scarcely long enough to correct a moral standpoint on which three months’ intercourse had effected so little real change, she hastened on. “Camilla is a right down good woman, but her manners leave something to be desired. In point of fact, she is a good deal soured--embittered is perhaps the better word--by having no children. Unluckily, she is one of those baby-maniacs, who never can reconcile themselves to being childless. I cannot personally understand the feeling; there seems to me something _animal_ about it.”

“I am very fond of children,” replied Bonnybell, thoughtfully; “but when I marry, I shall have only two.”

“You will have what God pleases to send you, I suppose,” rejoined Mrs. Glanville, sharply.

The other lifted her dove’s eyes. “More than two are destructive to the appearance.”

The hostess gave a sort of gasp. Of course, considering all things, the poor young creature was not to be blamed; but would not she herself have done more wisely to have in some degree prepared Camilla for the contents of the singular parcel she was sending her? Did “gay as a lark” at all cover the area occupied by this remarkable young person?

“My dear child,” she said, in a tone largely tinged with misgiving, “if you open the campaign at Stillington by remarks of that class, I shall have you back here in London by the first train to-morrow.”

“That will be clear gain, at all events.”

Mrs. Glanville did not assent.

“Camilla would be outraged at a girl of eighteen alluding to her future family at all; and if you made her the announcement that you have just made to me, I am convinced--yes, I am convinced--that she would take you by the shoulders and turn you out of the house!”

There was a minute’s pause, for Miss Ransome to assimilate this agreeable prophecy. Then she said in a voice of profound gloom--

“I believe that I shall spend my life in being turned neck and crop out of houses; and I shall never know what I have done!”

“You will, at all events, be able to give a good guess in _this_ case,” rejoined the other.

“I shall be able to avoid saying that one particular thing,” returned Bonnybell, accepting her snub with the most perfect sweetness, but in a rather hopeless tone; “but I shall, no doubt, say hundreds of other things which I shall find out too late that a _jeune fille_ ought not to have said. I have not the least idea what sort of things the right kind of _jeune fille_ does say.”

This wonder was expressed with apparently such perfect good faith, and such deferential asking for light, that Felicity--never very hardhearted, and possessed, in this case, by some slight inward compunction--abandoned her judicial attitude.

“Between ourselves,” she said, in a confidential tone, “there is very little that the _jeune fille_ of to-day does not say; but Camilla is not of to-day.”

“And is he--Mr. Tancred--not of to-day either?”

Felicity thought a moment. “Edward? No, Edward is not of to-day either. Edward is of no particular day; if anything, he has strayed out of the Middle Ages.”

The phrase, as applied to the person in question, had no particular meaning; but Mrs. Glanville admired her brother, and it sounded picturesque.

“We shall make an odd jumble of periods between us!”--still more hopelessly than before. “Oh”--with a sudden burst of clinging affection--“oh, how I wish that Mr. Glanville had allowed you to keep me permanently, as you were so dear and kind as to want to do.”

Miss Ransome’s delicate black arm was flung across her protectress’s knee, and her head and attendant black feathers were flopped down upon it; but she lifted her face soon enough to notice the expression that her aspiration had called up in Felicity’s countenance.

Mrs. Glanville had quite as soon that her young friend’s eyes had remained hidden, being conscious of a slight shade of confusion on the dial-plate of her own emotions, and a qualmy question flashed across her brain as to whether it was possible that in the very tail of the despairing orbs lifted to her, full of such unmistakable sorrowful gratitude, a tiny spark of contradictory mischief and mirth could lurk. Was it conceivable that the child--she was a terribly sharp child, and her vicious upbringing had made her still sharper--could have pricked the bladder, and detected the pious fraud of Tom’s supposed eagerness for her departure?

“You must not run away with the idea,” she said, with more flurry than approved itself to her own judgment--“you must not run away with the idea that Tom dislikes you.”

“Oh no, I am sure he does not”--with courteous hurry.

The little uplifted face was so touchingly, unresentfully sad, that Felicity decided with relief that the impression of hardly detectable amusement in it, received by her a minute ago, must have been an optical delusion.

“We shall both miss you very much,” she said with sincere cordiality. “When you are not impossible, you are as nice a little girl as one is likely to meet in a summer’s day. I have given you an excellent character, and all that you have got to do is to live up to it.”

“_To live up to it!_” repeated Bonnybell. “Will you mind telling me what you have said about me?”

Misgiving as to the height of the moral plane upon which Miss Ransome was warranted to move so obviously dictated this inquiry that Felicity laughed a little.

“I have said that you are as gay as a lark, to begin with. By-the-by”--with an air of bethinking herself--“if I were you I would not be _too_ gay, just at first. Of course, I thoroughly understand that it argues no want of feeling on your part, and that the rebound is perfectly natural; but Camilla is very conventional.”

Miss Ransome bowed her head submissively under the blast of these somewhat contradictory counsels.

“Gay, but not too gay,” she said, softly; and once again an uneasy faint impression of infinitesimal mirth went like a whiff through Mrs. Glanville’s consciousness.

“I have told her how invaluable you have been to me at the ‘Happy Evenings.’ There I shall miss you _cruelly_”--with an unmistakable accent of sincerity. “Your knack of holding the girls’ attention and keeping them amused is really very remarkable; so different from poor Miss Sloggett”--with a disgusted backhander at a subordinate fellow-worker in the vineyard of philanthropy.

“Is Mrs. Tancred like you? Like you, I mean, in giving up her life to--to doing good?”

“She is not as active as she might be,” replied Felicity, with a modest regret at the poor figure cut by her sister-in-law in the path of mercy. “Camilla does not come forward as she ought to do; she has that silly horror which I cannot understand”--and, indeed, no one has ever suspected Felicity of it--“of seeing her name in print; but I believe”--magnanimously--“that in her humdrum way, and with the greatest precaution, lest any one should hear of it, she does a fair amount of good.”

“And Mr. Tancred? Does he do good too?”

“Oh yes, of course, whenever he has the chance. He is on the Stock Exchange!” There was no unconscious irony in the juxtaposition of the two statements.

“On the Stock Exchange!” repeated the hearer, thoughtfully.

“He was determined not to be dependent on Camilla--to have a profession--so he went on the Stock Exchange. I do not know that it suits him particularly well; but anyhow it gives him something to do.”

“I see,” after a short pause; “Mr. Tancred is away most of every day, then?”

“Yes. Why shouldn’t he be?”--rather quickly.

“Oh, no reason at all; I was only thinking how nice and sensible it was!”

After another pause, “Does he never go to race-meetings?”

“Never.”

It took Miss Ransome two or three moments to assimilate this last, to her, incredible piece of intelligence; then she put another question.

“Do they never come up to London?”

“Oh yes, they are always in town from Christmas to Easter. They are not people who do much in the way of society, but in any case that would not affect you this year in your deep mourning.”

Bonnybell’s lip quivered, as if in preparation for a tear or two, but they were relentlessly snubbed back by their owner.

“Of course it would not.”

“But you shall help me with my Happy Evenings again,” continued Felicity, perceiving the droop in her young friend’s spirits, and with bowels genuinely yearning over her; “and the Fancy Fair for the All England Cataleptics will be coming off in May. You shall help me with that too. Oh, I am not joking; I really cannot say how much I shall miss my dear little right hand! There is the carriage,” as the butler entered to announce that the brougham was at the door. “This is really too sad! How I do hate the word ‘good-bye!’”

There were tears of real regret in Felicity’s eyes, and a quiver in her voice, as she explained that if the wind were not so cold she would accompany her _protégée_ to the hall door; and that she would say good-bye for her to Tom, who would be so sorry to have been out at the moment of her departure. But as it happened Tom had no need to be sorry. Tom was not out. As the long black slimness set its narrow foot on the last step of the stair, Tom emerged from the smoking-room.

“I am coming to see you off. I will jump into a hansom, and be at Paddington before you,” he said with a carefully lowered voice.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” came the precipitate answer. “I mean”--with a dove-like gentleness of correction of whatever was harsh in her first utterance, “that there is no place so odious for saying good-bye as at a railway-station.”

“It shall be as you wish. God bless you, dear!”

Tom’s heart was as large as his waistcoat, and there was a tear in his blue eye. It was still trembling there, as he turned from the street door, whence the neat green brougham was no longer visible, to face his wife, who, remembering a forgotten last word, had run downstairs just too late to utter it.

“You are _not_ out! How silly of you, with your bald head, to expose yourself to an east wind.”

“I wish that you would not rub my bald head quite so freely into me before the servants,” returned he, with less gratitude than exasperation, retreating into his lair.

“And I wish,” retorted she, “that you had not compelled me, by your silly sentimentality about her, to banish that poor dear homeless little creature.”

And then they both felt better.