A waif's progress

“Well?” she asked.

From the other end of the breakfast-table he returned--“Well?” and for several minutes this exchange of monosyllables seemed going to be the end--it was not quite the beginning--of the conversation that had sprung from a letter, and to the perusal or reperusal of that letter Mrs. Tancred had returned.

“Here is another instance of Felicity’s talent for laying her cuckoo’s egg in other people’s nests!” she said presently with a dryish smile. “There never was a woman who did more good--by proxy--than your sister.”

Mr. Tancred gave as much acquiescence as lay in silence to his wife’s indictment. If you are credited with having married a woman for her money, and can never for one whole minute forget it, you must acquiesce in many statements from which you differ far more widely than he did from the one in question.

“Why cannot she keep the girl herself?”

“Because Tom has put his foot down.”

This time both smiled; laughed out, indeed.

“That convenient foot!”

“It does not usually come down very heavily upon a pretty woman.”

“Who says that she is pretty?”--with a touch of quickness.

“I thought you did, or Felicity--or--some one.”

“I do not think that there is any allusion to her personal appearance. Now, what has become of my spectacles?”--embarking on that exasperating chronic chase which becomes in time the only species of sport left open to the elderly.

“I believe that you can see perfectly well without them,” rejoined he, always irritated by anything that emphasized the fifteen years of disparity in age between them. “What was the use of my giving you those tortoise-shell eyeglasses, if you never use them?”

“Silly, affected things!” replied she, ungraciously, yet with a something of contradictory kindness in her eye; and at the same moment discovering her missing spectacles, unaccountably astride upon her own high well-bared brow, she searched for, found, and read aloud the following sentences--

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome?’”

“Was that the woman who drank eye-wash and methylated spirit if she could not get anything else to quench her thirst?”

“She did it once too often. Do not interrupt again.

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago.’”

“Methylated spirits?” he threw in, disobedient to his wife’s hest, and she avenged herself by beginning all over again.

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago. I had done what I could for her, but it was one of those hopelessly inveterate cases of degradation for which no human aid is of any avail; and she died in a very distressing way last August. Tom went to the funeral.’

“I remember hearing that he was the only person who did, besides the two sham widowers who followed her in crape and weepers to Kensal Green.” The interruption this time emanated from the reader herself.

“‘Tom went to the funeral, and came back full of pity for the girl whom I believe to be really Lord Ransome’s daughter. We may as well give her the benefit of the doubt, at all events, though his--Lord Ransome’s--family decline to believe it, and refuse to do anything for her in consequence. As her family repudiated Claire’----”

“Who is Claire?”

“Why, the girl, of course! No, it is not. I see further down that the girl is Bonnybell. Claire must be the mother.

“‘As her family repudiated Claire when first she took to evil courses, the poor child has not a relation in the world to turn to, nor a roof to cover her. At the present moment she is with us, and as far as I am concerned might remain so indefinitely; but, then, Tom put his foot down.’”

Again one of the Tancred couple smiled with rich amusement.

“‘Under the circumstances it has struck me--I throw out the suggestion for what it is worth--that you might like to have her as an inmate, at all events for a while.’”

“We?”

“Yes, that is Felicity all over! But let me finish.

“‘She is as gay as a lark’ (gay as a lark, when her mother died three months ago!)”

“Died of drink!” amended he, with that sense of justice which is always more inherent in man than woman.

“‘Gay as a lark’ (dear feeling little thing!), ‘and I thought, and think--indeed, it is one of my chief motives for making the proposal’ (ahem!), ‘that the presence of a bright young creature would bring a great accession of cheerfulness into both your lives.’”

“Are we so uncheerful?” asked the man, in a tone whose vexation was coloured with misgiving.

“A childless home is never very merry,” replied his wife, shortly.

Tancred’s eyes dropped to the object upon which his hand was already resting, the head of the wire-haired fox-terrier, whom his mistress spoilt most, but who liked his master best. The husband had long ceased to wince outwardly, though never inwardly, when one of the two great “raws” of his life was touched. He had married Camilla, and he had not given her the children for whom she hungered in that passionate greed, only increased by years and improbabilities, with which some women crave for offspring. And now they had been married for fifteen winters, and Camilla was fifty years old.

“You see that I was right; there is no allusion to her personal appearance.”

“No, it was my stupid mistake.”

“Though she is ‘as gay as a lark,’”--harking back rather grimly to the phrase that had displeased her--“she may also be as ugly as sin.”

He thought it unlikely, but did not say so.

“Bonnybell!” continued she, derisively. “What a cruelly ironical name to inflict--‘Bonne et belle’--when she is probably neither the one nor the other!”