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 The Brewed Series
Fix
Whiskey
Glow
Fire

The Rebel Series

Lyric
Lock
Limit

The Redemption Series

Blackbird
Firefly
Nightshade

The Thatch Series

Letting Go
To The Stars
Show Me How

The Sharing You Series

Capturing Peace (novella)
Sharing You

The Forgiving Lies Series

Forgiving Lies
 Deceiving Lies
Changing Everything (novella)

The From Ashes Series

From Ashes
Needing Her (novella)

The Taking Chances Series

Taking Chances
Stealing Harper (novella)
Trusting Liam

Stand-Alone Novels
I See You
 Copyright © 2021 Molly McAdams
Published by Jester Creations, LLC.
First Edition
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no
part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any form or
by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior
permission of the publisher.
Please protect this art form by not pirating.

Molly McAdams
www.mollysmcadams.com
Cover Design by RBA Designs
Photo by © Eric Battershell Photography
Editing by Unicorn Editing

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Names, characters, places,
and plots are a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons,
living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Print ISBN: 9781950048014

eBook ISBN: 9781950048007
 CONTENTS

Dedication

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue

The End
Acknowledgments
About the Author
 Lie to Me is written as a standalone. However, if you’ve read the
Forgiving Lies series, you know the brother disappeared in Trusting
Liam because I sort of forgot all about him—yikes. But a group of
readers and I came up with this amazing idea that he was overseas
on a super-secret mission to make up for my forgetting him, and I’ve
stuck to that story.
Ever since, #HesOverseas has remained a fantastic constant with my
readers, but I thought it was time to bring him home.
So, Monsters, for the Facebook thread that started it all . . . this
book is for you.
He’s no longer overseas.
W hen the woman at the ticket counter asked me where I was
headed, I wanted to say, ‘anywhere.’
Get me a ticket anywhere. Just get me away from here.
Words I never thought I’d say.
Not when it came to Manhattan—the one place I’d chosen for
myself and had fallen in love with. Not when I’d vowed years before
that I would never turn into her.
Yet, there I was, weighed down with suitcases that made up my
life, leaving everything behind. No better than she’d ever been.
I’d grown up bouncing around from place to place in an RV with
my mom. It could’ve been fun, sure. When I was just a child, I’d
pretended we were on grand adventures, always headed to the
next. Really, Mom was always running away. From men, collectors,
responsibilities, dealers . . . reminding me with each place we left
that she and the road were all I had.
Warning me that family would try to take both from me.
But there was always some new man she met at a diner or gas
station that had us settling down for a few months, if we were lucky.
There was always an addiction that had me caring for her and had
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us on the run after she ran out of money . . . or stole it. And there
was always her mom, who we ran to every year when money and
food had been absent for too long.
The last time I saw my grandma, I was sixteen—ten years ago.

“T old you she’d try to take you from me,” my mom had hissed once
we were back in the RV, repeating the same words I’d heard every
time we’d left my grandma’s home.
Except, that time had been different. That time, before Lala had
tried to take me in—the way she always did—she’d told Momma she
wouldn’t give her another dime. That time . . . it had all gone so
wrong.
Momma had smacked the thin wall, bitterness falling from her
lips as she’d continued. “Go to her askin’ for help and look what she
did. Tried to take everything I have away from me.”

A nywhere had been on the tip of my tongue when that memory flitted
through my mind. I sputtered out, “South Carolina,” as I reached for
my wallet and began tearing through it, taking out every card and
looking in every slot.
Just as I was about to give up, I found a small, folded up paper
in a zippered compartment. When I opened it and saw Lala’s
address in my adolescent scrawl, I sighed in relief.
“South Carolina—Colby. I want to go there,” I said on a rush,
suddenly wanting nothing more than to find the only person who
had ever been a comfort. No longer caring just how horrifically
similar I was to my mother at that moment. “Get me a ticket as
close to there as you can.”
Within a handful of hours of purchasing the ticket, I was on a
plane and leaving everything behind. But as we lifted off the runway
and the city I loved disappeared beneath the clouds, something
cracked inside me . . .
 A month before my eighteenth birthday, I’d woken in Ohio to a
note from my mom, saying she’d gone to Vegas with her new
boyfriend to get married. Be back in a week, the note had said.
They’d never come back.
So, when I’d finally saved up enough to move to New York City, I
hadn’t had any plans. I’d just known the bustling city was a place
we’d never made it to in all our travels, and anywhere far away from
my childhood sounded like a good way to avoid repeating my
mother’s life.
I’d walked for hours and took countless subways until I found a
place in the worst location imaginable. But it had running water and
four walls, and I was able to afford it . . . for a couple months.
I applied for jobs any and everywhere and worked at a
restaurant just below my tiny apartment until I’d landed a position
as an assistant in a high-rise in Lower Manhattan. I’d worked my ass
off, eager to find my way and gain the respect I’d never had.
I’d reinvented myself there. I’d found myself in Manhattan and
had wanted to call it home for the rest of my life.
In the end, none of it had mattered. Because one night had
brought back dozens of memories and made me feel like a helpless,
worthless girl in an RV all over again. And suddenly, all of
Manhattan’s loud and noisy comforts had become suffocating.
So, there I was, pulling up to the familiar, Victorian-style home in
Colby, South Carolina just as the sun was setting on the day.
No longer employed. Desperate for someone to lean against.
Hoping my grandmother was still there.
Vowing to never let my guard down around a man again.
I shouldn’t have come back to Colby.
That had been painfully obvious right about the minute Lala
had opened the door the night before. My relief at seeing her—at
her still being in the same place—hadn’t lasted more than a second
before she’d staggered away and screamed.
Trembling hands out in front of her. Looking at me like she was
seeing a ghost.
And then a little girl had come running into the entryway to see
what was happening. A little girl with my eyes . . .

“H ow are you here ?” Lala had asked, sounding terrified and

dumbfounded.
“I . . .” I’d slowly dragged my gaze from the little girl who was
studying me, my stomach twisting uneasily for some reason. “I still
had your address.”
Lala’s head and hands had quickly shaken. “How? Joslin said—”
She’d glanced down at the girl and pressed her hands to the girl’s
shoulders. “Get ready for bed, Nora.”
 I’d watched her go, that unease growing and growing when
she’d glanced over her shoulder to look at me one last time as she
climbed the stairs.
Once she was on the second floor and out of hearing distance, a
soft cry had left Lala as she studied me. “I just can’t believe what
I’m seeing.”
“It’s been a long time, I know. I’m sorry.”
Her hand gripped her chest, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Emma, your momma told me you were dead.”

S uicide .
That’s what my mom had told Lala the last time she’d shown up,
begging for money. What’s funny about that? I would’ve been
eighteen—meaning, I was still living in the RV at the time, saving up
for New York. The RV my mom had never come back to.
The next time she’d come back to Colby had been two years
later. She hadn’t asked for money, just dropped off a quiet, watchful
baby and said, “Ain’t going through this shit again,” and left. She
hadn’t been back since.
Which meant, for nearly six years, Lala had been raising my little
sister. For even longer, she’d thought I was dead. And my mom was
truly staying away because she didn’t want the responsibility of a
child.
For whatever reason, she’d chosen to spare Nora the life she’d
dragged me through—used me to achieve.
I pushed my legs harder and harder as I crossed the street on
the way back to Lala’s house. As if I could outrun the sliver of
resentment that had formed in my chest when I’d learned the truth
about Nora.
But it remained, making me feel like the worst kind of human.
Not that I ever would’ve wished my life on anyone—especially
not another child. But why did I have to go through that life at all?
What was it about me that made her decide to keep me close and
ruin me over and over again? What was it about Nora that allowed
her to let that daughter go—to give her a chance at a real life?
I bit out a shamed curse as I slowed in front of Lala’s house, my
gaze automatically sweeping to where I could feel eyes on me.
Two old women were sitting on the front porch across the street,
shamelessly whispering to each other as they stared at me. As they
had been when I’d left earlier.
When one of them pointed at me and said something I didn’t
fully catch, I called out, “I’m sorry?”
“You’re here because you got caught, aren’t you?” she yelled.
I paced a little to keep my body moving, my head listing as I
wondered if this was normal for them. They’d asked if I was in the
CIA as I was leaving for the run. “Got caught?”
“You know what you did,” the other said loudly. “Laundering
money.”
A bemused huff burst from me. “I’m just visiting,” I said,
repeating what I’d told them earlier.
They nodded in sync. “We’ll figure it out,” the second said.
“Whatever the real reason is.”
“So weird,” I mumbled as I turned and hurried up the porch and
inside the house, abruptly stopping when a man in a Colby Fire
Department shirt came walking toward me with a grin and a plate
full of food.
“Mornin’.”
My lips parted on impulse, but my confusion left me unable to
say anything as I followed him with my eyes alone to a table filled
with three other men in similar shirts.
Next to them, a table with two police officers.
If it weren’t for the busybody neighbors behind me and the
staircase that haunted my dreams in front of me, I would’ve
wondered if I’d stepped into the wrong house.
I hurried to the kitchen, where I could hear Lala banging around,
and dropped my voice to a whisper when I neared her. “Lala, there
are people in your house.”
Police, I mentally added. There are police in your house.
 Instead of seeming surprised, she asked, “Didn’t you see all the
cars outside?”
My mouth slowly opened to respond only to close because I
hadn’t. I’d been too focused on the gossiping women across the
street. And that’s when I finally noticed everything scattered around
the kitchen.
The food.
The dishes.
The pots and pans.
“What . . . what is all this?”
Lala gave a little laugh as though it should’ve been obvious. “It’s
Thursday.”
“What does that mean?”
“First Responder Day here in the Wade house.” She sent me a
warm smile. “All first responders are welcome in my home on
Thursdays for any meal of the day.”
“That must cost—why would you do that?”
Her features hardened into a look that made me shrink inside. It
was pure disappointment and frustration wrapped in blood-bound
love.
It brought back memories of my childhood—of watching my
mother beg and lie for some cash. I’d never felt more like her than I
did then.
“Just tell me why the hell shouldn’t I? If you don’t approve of my
hospitality, you are free to find another place to stay.”
I stumbled over incoherent words before I finally managed to spit
out, “I just don’t understand why you choose to do this every week
by yourself without help for the funding or cooking. That’s all I
meant.”
She regarded me silently for a few moments before focusing on
the stove. “I think New York changed you. Or your mother did.
Either way, I’ll pray for the girl I knew to come back.”
“I haven’t—”
A wooden spoon was suddenly inches from my face, effectively
shutting me up. “The Emma I saw last would’ve asked who else we
could feed. Not why I feed them.”
 She might’ve been right. I couldn’t remember what I was like ten
years before. But if Lala had ever truly known me at all, she would
know I’d never willingly put myself anywhere near law enforcement.
When I didn’t respond, she explained, “I’ve had plenty of help
from the first responders in this city over the years. Even for things
that aren’t their jobs and they don’t get paid for. They’ve become my
and Nora’s family. The least I can do is offer them a meal. Besides,
this is the only way I’ve been able to help them in return.”
“I understand,” I said, then glanced around the kitchen. “Is there
anything I can help you with?”
“You can go find Nora,” she began in a tone that said she was
done with this conversation. “Tell her to come eat. Get you a plate
too.”
That unwarranted resentment sliced through my chest, and my
eyelids fluttered shut for a moment as I tried to force it away. When
it only lingered and mocked me with its presence, I started heading
out of the kitchen, murmuring, “Yes, ma’am.”
My stare darted over the men and women filling the living room
as I climbed the stairs, hand tight on the railing, breaths shallow as
their loud voices seemed to make the nightmare that accompanied
those steps even more disorienting.
I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and fortified the walls on my
past as I made it onto the landing and turned down the hall. A
pained breath forced from my lungs when my eyelids opened to find
Nora there.
“Jesus,” I hissed, staggering back a step and gripping at my
chest, my heart thundering beneath my hand.
Her stare was familiar and expression curious as she studied me
the way I was her.
After minutes in weighted silence, she sighed—her chest and
shoulders lifting and falling in exaggeration—and curled a stuffed
puppy closer to her chest.
I hadn’t even realized she was holding anything until then.
“I heard my Lala talking to you,” she said, voice soft.
It was the first time I’d heard her speak, and just hearing the
innocence in her tone made me want to protect her from everything
in the world and rage because I’d been stripped of my innocence
long before I was her age.
“Me and you have the same mommy.” Her stare drifted to the
wall, her little face scrunching up tightly. “She left me with my Lala.
Why did you leave me?”
“I didn’t even know you existed until last night,” I said bluntly.
“Our mom left me before you ever came along.”
Her fingers played with one of the puppy’s ears for a few seconds
as she seemed to think over my words. “She left you with my Lala
too?”
Old pains and bitterness flared in my chest. “No.” Tilting my head
toward the stairs, I said, “Lala wants you to go eat breakfast.”
Nora just watched me with those wide eyes as I started past her,
not moving or saying a word until I was almost to my room—my
mom’s old room. “You would have left me?”
“What?” I asked, voice maybe a little too harsh as I turned on
her.
“If you knew I sixisted,” she said, getting the word wrong. “You
would have left me too?”
Flashes of my life burst through my mind in an instant. That box
I’d tried so hard to keep closed tight breaking open and filling me
with an ice-cold dread. “With our mom?” I asked, horror and wrath
dripping from my lips.
Nora’s eyebrows drew close as she gave a small nod.
“I would’ve taken you and ran,” I said slowly, honestly. “I
would’ve made sure she would’ve never been able to find you.”
“Like hide ’n seek?”
I blinked quickly as I was slammed back into Nora’s reality—into
all the innocence. “Go eat, Nora.”
I hurried into the room and shut the door behind me, pressing up
against it as nightmares consumed my mind until I was a trembling
mess. Whether because of Manhattan or being immersed in bits of
my past again, I didn’t know.
It didn’t matter.
Because they hadn’t broken me then, and they wouldn’t now.
 I sucked in steeling breaths until everything was trapped behind
the walls I’d spent so many years building. Until I had a handle on
myself again.
With one last harsh exhale, I pushed from the door and headed
for my bags. Searching through everything until I’d found a change
of clothes. My eyes caught on my phone, on the shattered screen,
and my movements slowed. Faltered as that last night in Manhattan
tried creeping through my defenses.
A shiver raked down my spine as I forced that night back.
“Fuck you, Chris,” I mumbled as I grabbed up my phone and
went to shower, dropping my phone in the bathroom trash where it
and the past belonged.

I choked and nearly spit the liquid back into the cup that afternoon
but somehow managed to swallow it through my coughing.
“Lala,” I wheezed and coughed a few more times. Holding up the
Mason jar, I inspected it closely. “What the hell is in this?”
She didn’t turn from where she stood at the island, just pointed
behind her with a huge chef’s knife. “Don’t you dare use that
language, young lady, you are not the owner of this house.
Manners.”
I swallowed back any retort I may have had. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s real tea,” she explained.
“This is pure sugar.”
“Mmhm. And it’s good for the soul.” She did a little dance as she
went back to chopping, the woman never seeming to tire.
We were in a weird in-between time where lunch was ending in
the kitchen and dinner was being prepped. All the while, first
responders continued coming in and out to devour a homemade
lunch.
Lala hadn’t stopped moving, and I was exhausted. I didn’t know
how she did this every week by herself.
 But I could see it was appreciated and she was adored. Every
person who’d come into the kitchen to make a plate had stopped to
give her a hug or a kiss on the cheek. Every one of them had
affectionately called her Lala as if they all claimed her as their own.
Whenever Nora was around, people doted on her as if she was their
little sister or child.
I was thankful my grandma had been loved and cared for when
we’d abandoned her. Despite the unwelcome resentment, I was
thankful Nora had somewhere safe to grow and people who adored
her . . . beyond thankful. But I’d spent most of the time at the sink
doing dishes so no one would see that, with each person, I hated
myself a little more for being part of the reason they’d needed a
makeshift family.
“It’s gonna give me a heart attack, Lala.” I hesitantly sniffed the
drink in my hand. “Or diabetes.”
She scoffed, then turned and gave me a soft smile. “I have been
drinking that since I was in my momma’s belly, same as your
momma and you. You will be fine.”
“I don’t think I’ll make it through this one glass.”
She rolled her eyes and went back to whatever it was she was
chopping. “Come tomorrow, I’m betting you’ll be pouring yourself
another glass.”
“I doubt tha—” I pressed harder against the counter, barely
managing to keep my composure when a man walked into the
kitchen.
Hardened stare that quickly scanned the room before settling on
me. Corded muscles filled heavily tattooed arms. Lips twisted into a
lethal smirk that somehow looked natural.
Dressed casually, when every other person today had been in
some type of uniform.
Everything about him screamed trouble. Danger. The real
kind . . . because one look at him, and I knew his kind.
Sinfully handsome, bad to their core, with a unique ability to get
women to do anything before leaving them broken.
I’d spent most of my life surrounded by men like him.
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 Lala dropped the knife and made an excited sound. In the
second it took me to glance at her, his smirk had transformed into a
warm, charming smile.
“Hey, Lala,” he said as he pressed a kiss to her cheek and
enveloped her in a quick hug. “Is there any chance you need all the
bread in my truck?”
Lala clucked her tongue and held a hand to her chest, her cheeks
reddening. “How did you know?”
With a brief shrug, the man started backing away. “Had a
feeling.”
“My Reed!” a tiny voice cried out, preceding Nora as she came
running into the kitchen, barreling into the side of the man and
holding tight.
I watched, a mixture of surprise and wariness unfurling in my
stomach as he grabbed her up and swung her onto his back with the
ease of a practiced move.
“How’s my favorite girl?” he asked as he headed out of the
kitchen.
And Lala just let them go—let Nora go.
I followed a few steps, unsure if I should stop them or not.
Nora had responded softly to almost every person who had
spoken to her that day. Some people, she’d just offered shy smiles
or refused to speak to at all. Her reaction to this Reed had been
unlike anything else I’d seen from her.
Clearly, she knew him, as did Lala. But for the life of me, I
couldn’t figure out why he was the one to get that kind of reaction
from them.
I knew men like him. Lala knew men like him.
“Who is that, and why is he here?” I asked, the words bubbling
up on their own accord.
“His name is Reed, and he’s just as welcome as anyone else in
this town.” Disappointment oozed from Lala when I faced her at her
sharp words. “I have never been so ashamed of you as I have been
today.”
“Do not look at me like that. Do not look at me as if I am the one
going against everything I have ever said.” My voice came out softer
and sharper as I continued. “You are the one who told me to stay
away from men like him.”
Lala’s eyes widened at my tone.
I felt myself cringe.
Felt that kneejerk instinct to apologize, but I couldn’t at that
moment. Everything she’d ever engrained in me . . . nearly every
nightmare from my life . . . she’d brushed away with one short
interaction.
I pointed at her. “You told me, you told me . . . you said, ‘You see
that man? A man like that is nothing but trouble. You stay away
from men who look like that.’ And I have. I’ve run from men like him
because I was forced to watch as they ruined Momma’s life.”
As they ruined my life.
But the truth of my life was something I’d sworn to never burden
my grandma with.
I’d seen it every time my mother and I had shown up, asking for
money—the pain and worry in Lala’s eyes when she looked at me.
Knowing the truth would wreck her, I was sure of it.
“Oh, Emma.” Lala sighed and her expression softened. “I didn’t
mean the appearance. I meant the man. His aura. His soul. The men
your momma hung around with and married . . . they were pure
evil.” She waved her hand through the air. “So Reed has some
tattoos—”
“Some? Lala, he’s covered.”
Literally.
There were tattoos peeking above the collar of his shirt. Swirling
down his arms like sleeves. Littering his hands. Decorating his
calves.
I could only imagine if he took his shirt off, there would be plenty
more.
“Covered in ink or not, you will be polite when he returns.”
At that exact moment, the man in question walked in. Those
tattooed arms weighed down with loaves of garlic bread, and Nora
clinging to him like a monkey, talking excitedly.
He took one look at me and then directed his attention to Lala.
Trouble.
 Dangerous.
Handsome—no. Not.
Lala smiled at him adoringly when he hefted the bags on the only
empty space left on the counters. “Saw Peter this morning.”
“Yeah?” Reed said with a bright smile. “Blush any harder over
Peter Rowe, and I might start thinking I’m not your favorite, Lala.”
At that, Lala did blush, and Nora giggled wildly. “Oh, you hush,”
she said, waving him off. “You know I love you both. Now, fix you a
plate.”
He held up a hand and stepped back. “I’m good.”
Lala’s thinning eyebrows lifted. “I said—”
“I’m not on today.”
“That makes no difference to me. Make a plate, or I’ll have to
drive one over to you. You wouldn’t want to make an old woman
leave her kitchen, now would you?”
His lips formed a thin line as if he was trying to figure out how to
stay firm and not disrespect her. “No.”
“Sorry. What was that?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I’ll help you make a plate, my Reed,” Nora said as he helped her
to the floor.
He started to speak, then paused as his stare darted to me.
Stepping forward so he could lean over the island to speak directly
to my grandma, he dropped his voice low. “I’d rather this food go to
whoever’s working—”
“You picked up groceries for me. That’s work enough.”
“Lala . . .”
Lala planted her hands firmly on the island. “Get a plate and get
you some food before I call your momma, boy.”
Nora gasped and covered her mouth with both hands.
Reed’s lips formed another tight line, this time so different than
the last.
His jaw tensed and worked like he was putting too much
pressure on it. The muscles in his arms rippled and twitched like he
was restraining himself from reacting in any way.
 My initial assessment of him was coming to life in front of
me . . . only now I was enraptured. The sudden, frustrated set of his
features was alarming and fascinating and edged on this side of
terrifying.
I should have been horrified.
He was every man I’d hated and cursed. Every man who’d had a
hand in ruining my life. But I couldn’t look away.
I was captivated and intrigued and too curious for my own good.
Some small part of me was urging me to move. To put myself
between him and my grandma or my sister. To protect them from a
man like Reed when he was obviously struggling to remain calm.
A reflex from years of trying to protect my mom.
But I didn’t do any of those things. I wasn’t sure I could move at
all. I just stood there, waiting for something.
For him to look at me. To speak. To give me a reason to stare at
that expression for days on end. For a chance to touch him.
Anything.
All while sucking down the sweetest tea I’d ever tasted.
Reed’s hardened steel-gray eyes had been fixated on a spot on
the island. When they snapped up, they burned with something that
awakened a place inside me.
“Lala, that was low,” Reed said in a soft, rumbling tone.
“Would do you some good,” she said dismissively.
Reed rubbed at his jaw and laughed, dark and husky and
everything a laugh had no right sounding like. “I’m not ready. You
need to drop it.”
It wasn’t until I was halfway through the tea that I realized what
I was doing . . .
Running back to Lala . . . needing help . . . fantasizing about the
quintessential bad boy.
Tall, dark, handsome, covered in tattoos and screaming how he
would be the beginning of a ruined life.
Not fantasizing. Not.
Oh my God, what is wrong with me?
I set the tea on the counter harder than intended, then was out
of the kitchen and up in my room in seconds. Throwing the few
items I’d taken out of my bags back in and zipping them up before
my thoughts had unscrambled enough for me to be able to make
sense of what I was doing.
Not more than a minute later, I heard the telltale sound of Lala’s
steps in the hall, getting closer and closer.
Worry wove through her tone when she called out, “Emma,
honey, are you okay?”
I turned in time to see her come through the door.
Disappointment and hurt etched lines on her face before she
could wash them away with a look of indifference. “I see.”
“I have to leave.” The statement was nothing more than a
whisper, but it rocked me.
The truth of it.
The lie.
The way every part of me screamed no.
Because I knew . . . I knew I needed to be there.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have anywhere to go. I’d been faced with
that challenge before, and I’d made a life for myself. I’d figured it all
out on my own. I knew I could do it again and again and again.
But there was an ache that had formed deep within me when
Lala opened the door the night before, as if my soul were saying
finally. As if the journey I’d been on all these years had been leading
me here all along.
But turning into Momma . . .
That I couldn’t do.
And being here, I was afraid that was exactly what would
happen.
“I can’t become her,” I said tightly. “If I stay here, I will. I know
it.” I gestured to myself then her as I continued speaking. “Look at
me. I’m already following in her footsteps. I wanted to have a life as
far from hers as possible, and everything I’m doing leads me down
the same path. I can’t be her. I can’t stay here.”
Lala rubbed at her head and then hurried to smooth her pale
hands over her apron. “If that’s how you feel.”
My entire being begged me to say no, that wasn’t how I felt.
That I was terrified.
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Title: A waif's progress

Author: Rhoda Broughton

Release date: May 20, 2024 [eBook #73654]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1905

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
available at The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WAIF'S

PROGRESS ***
CHAPTER I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII,
XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII,
XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI,
XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV.

A WAIF’S PROGRESS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Crown 8vo. 2s. each.

Goodbye, Sweetheart!
Cometh up as a Flower.
Joan.
Belinda.
Dr. Cupid.
Not Wisely but Too Well.
Red as a Rose is She.
Alas!
Seylla or Charybdis?
Mrs. Bligh.
Second Thoughts.
A Beginner.
Dear Faustina.
Nancy.
The Game and the Candle.
Foes in Law. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Lavinia. Crown 8vo. 6s.
London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

A WAIF’S PROGRESS
 BY
RHODA BROUGHTON

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
A WAIF’S PROGRESS
 CHAPTER I
“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!”
“Let us hope for the worst, at all events,” said he, gently caustic.
“Bonnybell! She was probably named after one of the two sham
widowers’ racehorses.”
“I thought you calculated that she dated from the pre-widower period.”
 “Ay, so she must have done. Then she was named after one of Lord
Ransome’s hounds. If you remember, he kept the Mudshire for several years
before a barbed-wire fence broke his worthless neck for him.”
Tancred had known Lord Ransome a little; and the question crossed his
mind as to whether it was worth while saying that his neck was not more
valueless than his neighbours’. He decided that it was not. If you possess a
wife with very decided opinions and a very trenchant mode of expressing
them, why not let her enjoy them in peace? You may, at least, make her
these trifling amends for the irreparable injury you have done her.
“If we refuse the girl,” he began slowly, after an interval spent in
cogitation by two of the party, and in muffled remonstrances at the unusual
delay in brewing his slopbasin of weak tea on the part of the third—“if we
refuse the girl, what is the alternative?”
“None, apparently, but the streets.”
“Poor little devil!”
“I do not think that that consideration need sway us!” retorted she. “If
we let ourselves go, a blind philanthropy might lead us to try and unpeople
the Haymarket; and, moreover, it would not come to that. I have never
known Felicity fail in getting hold of fingers to pull her chestnuts out of the
fire for her, and she will not now.”
He agreed with this view of his sister, and said so; and then there was a
pause for refreshment, the slopbowl claim having become too vocal to be
longer ignored.
“She is probably as full of hereditary vice as she can hold,” resumed
Camilla, presently stooping to test with her forefinger the temperature of
Jock’s tea. “No, my dear boy, you are not telling the truth, it is not too hot.
Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides.”
“I never heard that Ransome was particularly immoral.”
“The presumption is in favour of it; they mostly go together.”
“And we will not give him the benefit of the doubt, eh?”
“Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides, selfishness on both
sides, extravagance and folly on both sides,” enumerated she, checking off
the unknown’s heritage upon her fingers.
“Poor little devil!” in a tone of even profounder compassion than had
conveyed his former utterance of the phrase. “If your view is correct, she
starts in life pretty well handicapped, doesn’t she?”
“Poor little devil!” repeated his wife, in a key of some exasperation. “I
think that we should be the poor little devils if we consented to receive such
an inmate.”
“But there is no necessity for us to do so. It is easy to say no.”
“Easy to say no to Felicity? Easy for you to say no to any one?”
Again he winced, though this time, if every one had their due, the wince
should have been hers. Had she forgotten, or was she impossibly alluding to
the one pregnant occasion on which he had not had the strength of mind to
say no? Her voice, high and decided, cut into his strangled thought.
“Whichever way we settle it, must be at once—to-day. If she does not
hear to the contrary by return of post, Felicity is quite capable of taking
silence for consent, and packing the girl off by the next train, as she did her
pet inebriate to Mrs. Holmes last summer.”
“I will leave you to decide,” he answered, with an effort at flight,
contemptible since it was unsuccessful.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” answered she, seizing him by the
lapel of his coat, as he passed her on his way to the door. “You will not shift
the responsibility of the whole affair upon me.”
“What do you feel like?” he answered resignedly, not struggling in a
clasp which had more of mastery than endearment in it. “Surely it will
affect you infinitely more than it will me.”
Seeing him thus docile, she loosed her hold. “At my age,” she said, “all
changes in the framework of one’s life seem to be for the worse.”
“Then let it be no,” he answered, though not again endeavouring for
freedom, since he felt that one step in that direction would merely mean
recapture.
“And yet,” she said, a sort of wistfulness that he too well knew coming
into her hard light eyes, “the house is very silent; but for Jock it might be a
house of the dead sometimes.”
“We are not very rowdy, I suppose,” he answered, following the ups and
downs of her thought with a rueful gentleness.
“We are a dull couple,” she returned, veering round instantly on the other
tack; “unquestionably we are often dull—childless people must always be
so—but if we admit this equivocal element into our lives, we may become
something much worse than dull.”
“Then do not let us admit it.”
“On the other hand, there would to you at least be the undoubted
advantage of the companionship of some one nearer your own age.”
He laughed softly, rallying her. “Felicity is foisting a young thing of five
and thirty on us, then, is she?”
Camilla laughed also, a little unbending in her own grim way, but
recapturing gravity and the argument almost instantaneously.
“Granting that she is eighteen or twenty in actual years, she is probably a
hundred in experience of evil.”
“In short, you are afraid that she will take the bloom off our young
innocence,” returned he, flying for refuge to irony, and resolutely leaving
the room this time, followed by Jock, who, replete with tea, no longer saw
any object in pretending that he liked his mistress best.
 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.
 CHAPTER III
“I cannot think why she is coming by such an early train,” said Mrs.
Tancred, referring to a note less blackly bordered than she thought it ought
to be.
“Perhaps Tom has put his foot down,” returned her husband.
“She spells brougham phonetically, as if it were a besom.” After a
moment, “What on earth shall I do with her between tea and dinner time?”
“Tell her to ‘rest.’ Is not that the proper thing?”
“Pooh! at eighteen they never want to rest.”
“Shall you only send to meet her at Swinston, or go yourself?”
He had tried to make the question as colourless as possible, but had not
been able quite to keep out of his tone a slight indication of bias towards the
more welcoming course.
“I shall send. I have no wish to be seen by any chance member of my
acquaintance who may happen to be on the platform with a young member
of the demi-monde sobbing in my arms.”
Edward Tancred received this fiat in silence; even the shrug with which
he greeted it was an inward one of the spirit alone, and in which the
shoulders took no part. Perhaps the rebuke implied in his muteness or the
stings of her own conscience might have suggested to Camilla that she had
rather overdone the brutality of her last speech, for though her next
utterance was not amiable, the key in which it was pitched was distinctly
less trenchant than its predecessor’s.
“I hope she will not think it necessary to kiss me. Of course she will not
wish to do so”—Mrs. Tancred had no illusion as to her own destituteness in
the matter of charm; her husband sometimes thought that life would be
rather easier if she had—“but she may think I expect it.”
“If she does, and it happens indoors, so that nothing compromising is
involved, I hope you will be equal to the occasion.”
There was that something of lightly mocking in his tone which, as
Camilla knew, implied the nearest approach to disapproval he ever
permitted himself of any of her words or actions.
“Perhaps you would like to go to meet her in the brougham yourself?”
 “I shall not be back from London.”
The matter-of-fact answer to a question intended to be a scoff took the
wind out of Mrs. Tancred’s sails, which for a moment or two flapped idly
against her masts. But presently a new zephyr swelled them.
“It is a leap in the dark, if ever there was one; and at my age the taste for
such agilities is pretty well extinct.”
There was such a sombre misgiving in her tone, that his own changed at
once to that of the kindest, patientest reasoning.
“Don’t you think you are making rather a mountain out of a molehill?
The girl comes as an ordinary visitor. Supposing the worst, that you—we”
(correcting himself) “do not care much about her, the visit ends, she goes,
and whose bones are broken?”
Mrs. Tancred shook her head. “Having once undertaken her, I shall put it
through, unless, of course”—with her little dry laugh—“you set your foot
down, like Tom.”
“The comparison jarred upon him. She had meant it to do so, as a relief
to her own ill humour, but not being one of those fortunate people who can
indulge in pet vices, like indigestible dainties, without after ill effects, she
expiated her ebullition by an instantaneous remorse, which, being
unexpressed, did neither of them any good.
“Felicity gave one absolutely no data to go upon”—drawing from her
pocket the brief note inserted in Miss Ransome’s letter by the warranter of
that young lady’s general soundness. “ ‘Gay as a lark.’ ” She paused after
the quotation, and Edward had a nervous dread that she was going to add
the oft-repeated gloss, “When her mother died three months ago,” but for
once she abstained. “ ‘Gay as a lark, and has been of invaluable assistance
to me in my “Happy evenings.” ’ Not a word else! not a hint as to her
character, her tastes, her faults!”
“Perhaps she will be of invaluable assistance to us in our happy
evenings.”
It was said in a perfectly innocent voice, as offering a plausible
suggestion; but his wife knew that it was his revenge for Tom’s foot.
“B-r-o-o-m! Yes, there can be no mistake about it!” said Mrs. Tancred,
recurring to and carefully verifying poor Miss Ransome’s stumble upon the
path of orthography, and forcing her husband to verify it too.
 He laughed with contemptible male leniency. “Do you think she will
arrive riding upon it, like a witch?” His slight mirth was not infectious.
“I think that to our other treats we shall have to add that of educating
her.”
“Oh, I would not bother about that!” replied he, departing from his
golden rule of never offering advice to that consort, who had had so much
longer a time to learn wisdom in than had been his portion. “I would not
bother about that. Let her ride through life upon her broom, if it amuses
her.”
“That may be your happy-go-lucky way,” replied she, crisply, “but it is
not mine.”
Happy-go-lucky! He repeated the epithet over to himself several times,
in the dogcart, as he sent his horse along the flat old coach road, liberal of
margin, to Swinston station; while the idle question put itself to his
intelligence, whether a compound word, of which neither of the component
parts was true, could be true as a whole? Happy-go-lucky. He was neither
“happy” nor “lucky.” Could he, therefore, be truly said to be happy-go-
lucky?
There was another traveller on the same line of railway, in the afternoon
of that day, who made the hour’s journey from Paddington in a train that
preceded the express which brought Mr. Tancred back from the City, and
whose reflections, despite the lark-quality with which she was credited,
were not much more rosy-tinted than his own.
“I wonder,” she said to herself, as her great eyes, that were no longer
under any compulsion to look grateful, or affectionate, or docile, in the
matchless freedom of an empty railway-carriage, followed the yellow-brick
squalors of the sliding slums. “I wonder how long it will be before Edward
puts his foot down in the same way that Tom did? Will it be a matter of
months or weeks? Judging from the portrait good old Felicity drew of her
sister-in-law, I should say it might be minutes! If old Tom had not been such
an ass, I might have stayed with them for ever and a day, and it was not a
bad berth! What asses most men are! and all what brutes! No, not all! Old
Tom is not a brute! How kind he was on the day of the funeral during that
horrible drive to Kensal Green! But what an ass! ‘I shall be at Paddington
before you! God bless you, dear!’ ”
 She chuckled a little, and the lark—a very sophisticated town lark—
began to re-awake in her.
Presently, having the carriage to herself, she left her seat and flitted to
the opposite window, then back again, standing up to command the
landscape better. Not that she had any taste for landscape, an appreciation
of the beauties of Nature being as much a matter of education as spelling or
ciphering, and possessed as little by the peasant as the dog. She knew that
Italy or Switzerland expect to be admired; but that the tame, Alpless,
templeless Berkshire, through which the G.W.R. was carrying her, could
command any approbation would never have occurred to her, even though
November seemed reluctant yet to tear from the pleasant countryside its red
and sombre garment of autumn.
But though gifted with no love of the picturesque, Miss Ransome was
endowed with plenty of alert curiosity, which grew sharper as the little
diamond-set watch at her wrist told her that she must be nearing her
destined station, and caused her to scan with a keener interest the “country
seats”—in advertisement phrase—which here and there were indicated by a
lodge visible from the line, or a gable peeping through red woods. She had
not been informed as to the distance from Swinston to Stillington Manor.
Any one of those half or quarter revealed houses might therefore prove to
be her future home. If not, it might prove to be the home of a neighbour and
acquaintance. Any one of those neighbours might possess an eldest son.
“Marriage is the only possible outlet for me,” she said to herself,
relapsing into gloom, as her eye rested appraisingly upon the brand-new
machicolations of a pretentious mansion on a low hillside. “It is an odious
one, yet there is no other; but whatever old Felicity may say, I will not have
more than two children. If I have not a very good settlement, I will have
none. Why should I bring any poor creature into the world to be a wretched
little adventurer like myself?”

“Miss Ransome.”
Never had the voice of her butler made an announcement less grateful to
Mrs. Tancred’s ears. They were prepared for it, as the sound of the horses’
hoofs had penetrated to the morning-room, where she sat alone before her
tea-table. But that sound had not been permitted to lift her spectacles—the
pair most hated of Edward’s soul, with the thickest rims and the largest
goggles—from her book. She would do her duty by the expected imposition
when once it was laid on her shoulders, but that she should manifest
empressement or pleasure in assuming the burden so brazenly shifted by
Felicity from her own to Camilla’s back would be an offence at once
against truth and decency.
Though Bonnybell had heartily dreaded and disliked the idea of her
change of milieu, it had never occurred to her that the introduction to her
new patroness would make her feel shy. Felicity kissed her upon arriving. A
fortiori, Camilla would wish to kiss her, since in Miss Ransome’s
experience the less attractive a human countenance was, the more anxious it
was to approach itself to one’s own. She must be prepared for this, must
appear willing, if possible more than willing, to be embraced.
This had been her plan of campaign during the five-mile drive in the
brougham, while clanking under the stone portico of the hall door, while
passing through the evidently much-sat-in large hall, and being ushered into
the morning-room opening out of it; but no sooner had her feet crossed the
threshold of this latter, and seen the tall gauntness that faced her slowly
rising from its seat and deliberately replacing its spectacles in their leather
case, and awaiting her without one conciliatory inch of advance towards
her, then, with lightning speed, she realized the impossibility of her project.
Attempt to kiss that icy mask! Her buoyant step faltered, her ideas grew
confused, only a hazy notion that her plan was a good one, and that she
must carry out as much of it as was possible, still occupying her brain.
With merely this dim guide for her conduct, and becoming aware that
she was now quite close to the grey-haired iceberg ahead, she dropped a
little French curtsey, and laid a small, respectful, butterfly kiss upon the
bony fingers held grudgingly out to her.
Mrs. Tancred snatched away her hand, though more in a sort of ferocious
mauvaise honte than from any more hostile motive. It was so very seldom,
throughout her fifty years, that any one had kissed Camilla’s hand. Edward
had done so, fifteen years ago, as a graceful unmarried lad of twenty, in
innocent acknowledgment of long hospitalities, and she had thereupon
straightway proposed marriage to him—that marriage which he had been
too young, too grateful, and too much taken aback to decline.
Was it any wonder that, having such associations with the courtesy in
question, Mrs. Tancred should mark her disapprobation of it with what, to
the uninitiated, might seem needless emphasis?
To Bonnybell this miscarriage of her plan of action at its very outset
brought a momentary paralysis, and she stood dumbfounded, while an
awkward remorse for her reception of what, though silly and misplaced,
might have been a well-meant civility, impelled Camilla to make a
conciliatory remark to the effect that she was afraid the tea was cold.
“I like it cold,” replied Miss Ransome, with the sweetest promptitude
and the most instantaneous rally.
“You like it cold?” repeated Camilla.
The repetition of the polite assertion was merely because that ferocious
shyness of hers did not suggest to Mrs. Tancred any more original
observation; but the tone in which it was conveyed made Miss Ransome say
to herself that “the old woman was even more terrible than she had
expected.” No sign of this reflection appeared, however, on the dial-plate of
her innocent face.
“I mean that I do not mind its being cold. I like to take it just as it
comes.”
“Is that the way in which you like to take things generally?” asked the
other, unstiffening into an involuntary smile.
It was difficult to look at anything so small, so dewy, so palpably made
of rose-leaves as Bonnybell’s face without smiling; and in addition to this
impulse shared by the generality of her species, Mrs. Tancred had for her
own portion that extravagant admiration of beauty which, unmixed with any
tincture of spite, is the doubtful appanage of the frankly ugly and really
good among women.
“I think one has to, more or less, don’t you think?” replied the rose-leaf
with a pretty diffidence, as one not competent to hold an opinion with any
tenacity in the presence of a person so far superior in wisdom to herself.
With a passing shudder at the slipshodness of the grammar displayed in
the answer, coupled with a slight sense of approbation of the deference of
its tone, and an inward reflection—somewhat the reverse of that lately
made by its object—that the new arrival was not quite so impossible as she
had expected, Mrs. Tancred thawed a little further, and put an almost
friendly question as to the welfare of the couple whom her visitor had just
left.
 “Mrs. Glanville has a slight cold,” replied the other, with the glad
glibness of feeling herself on safe ground, “but taking care of it, and I do
not think it will be much. She caught it as we were coming out of the
‘Happy Evening’ last Thursday.”
For a moment Mrs. Tancred hesitated. Should she seize this early
opportunity for beginning the projected education of her charge, and point
out to her that it is grammatically impossible to come out of a “Happy
Evening,” or should she let the slip pass? Her rejoinder showed that she had
chosen the weaker-minded alternative.
“Felicity tells me that you have been invaluable to her at the Recreation
Hall.”
“I was so glad to be able to do any little thing to show my gratitude to
her.”
The statement was certainly not untrue, but as certainly that was not the
reason for its utterance. Veracity being a goddess who had never occupied a
very high position in Bonnybell’s Pantheon, she said it because she thought
that the jeune fille, up to whose character she was in these surroundings
bound to try to live, should and would say it.
“Felicity would have liked you to prolong your visit to them
indefinitely?”
There was a faint accent of asking in what would otherwise sound like
the assertion of a fact, and Miss Ransome stole a wily glance at her hostess.
Did she know about Tom, or was she trying to find out?
Twenty-four hours later the girl would not have put this question even to
herself, having long ere the expiration of that time learnt how little the
indirect or circuitous entered into Camilla’s methods. Here was need for
wary walking.
“She said so.”
“Then the objection came from Tom?”—with an accent of very thinly
veiled incredulity.
But the cautious young stranger was not to be surprised into any such
admission, nor did the fact that Felicity’s version of the circumstances
departed somewhat widely from strict accuracy make it at all less easy to
her young protégée to back it up.
 “Of course, it must be a nuisance for any man to have a third person
always en tiers with him and his wife,” she replied with a judicious
generality. Then, divining from something in Mrs. Tancred’s face that the
ground was not very firm under her, she skipped off it with a masterly
agility. “That was what made it so overwhelmingly kind of you and Mr.
Tancred to let me be sent here.”
The humility of the wording, with its plain implication that the speaker
could never be regarded except as a burdensome parcel to be transferred
from one pair of reluctant hands to another, and the guilty feeling that such
had been precisely her own attitude of mind towards her, combined to
mollify yet further the person at whom they were aimed.
“Edward and I are too old married people to have Tom’s eagerness for a
tête-à-tête,” she said, with a hint of what Bonnybell suspected to be irony,
“but”—with a smile that, though, like everything else about her, was
unbeautiful, was yet not hostile—“I think it was kind of us!”
 CHAPTER IV
“They must have a chef,” said Bonnybell after dinner to herself, as she and
Camilla began to tread back their path through the long enfilade of rooms
that led from the dining-room to the library, where, accompanied by ceiling-
high books, the small family apparently spent its evenings. “The cuisine is
better than the Glanvilles’. I fancy that philanthropic women very seldom
have good cooks. Yes, they have a chef! What a fool he must be to spend
two-thirds of the year in the country!”
As she and her hostess stood by the fire, Miss Ransome’s reflections
took another turn.
“What a gloomy room! Not a single photograph about! How much better
those old ancestors would look taken out of their frames and draped in
light-blue velvet, as poor Claire did ours before she sold them!”
Mrs. Tancred, with an evident intention of industry, sat down by a green-
shaded electric lamp, and drawing a roomy work-basket towards her,
extracted from it a large piece of homely plain sewing.
“Ought I to set a footstool for her, or is she the kind of person who likes
to do everything herself? Ah, it is as I thought,” as the diffidently offered
support was rejected with the words—
“Thank you, my dear; but my legs are long, and I have no wish to have
my knees knocking against my nose.”
“I am so sorry,” returned Bonnybell, humbly; “it is a silly habit that I
have got into! Claire never could bear to be without a footstool!”
Mrs. Tancred’s seam remained suspended in mid air, the needle arrested
in its journey, while through her spectacles her eyes, which looked far too
penetratingly keen to need them, flashed in shocked displeasure at her
visitor.
“Claire!” she repeated in an awful voice. “Who is Claire?”
“Claire was my mother,” replied the girl, quailing, and crying to herself
in a passion of self-reproach that she had made a colossal blunder on the
very threshold; that, of course, the jeune fille does not allude to her mother
by her Christian name.
“And you speak of her as Claire?”
 “It was her own wish. She could not bear me to call her mother; she
thought it dated her—of course, it did.”
Mrs. Tancred was silent for a minute or two. It would be unseemly to
address to the daughter of the departed the vigorous epithets which alone
sprang to her own lips in connection with that lady. Presently a suddenly
risen hope set speech free again.
“If those were Lady Ransome’s views, she probably did not care to have
you much with her.”
“Oh yes, she did—sometimes,” replied the girl, slowly, and with a
painful weighing of each word by the jeune fille standard. “She liked us to
be taken for sisters; and when the light was not strong there really looked
very little difference in age between us.”
Again there was a pause, the potent reasons of her deadness and her
motherhood being scarcely potent enough to keep within the barrier of Mrs.
Tancred’s lips the expression of her estimate of the scandalous author of
Bonnybell’s being. Her next question in the constraint of its tone evidenced
the violence done to her inclinations.
“You were educated at home? or were you sent to school?”
“I was at school in Paris for a while.”
“For long?”
Bonnybell hesitated slightly. In point of fact, her sojourn in the Pension
de Demoiselles in question had not outlasted a month; but “Toute vérité
n’est pas bonne à dire.”
“For some time.”
“And then Lady Ransome found that she could not get on without you?”
Reprobation of the implied selfish disregard of her daughter’s welfare
had forced itself unconquerably into Camilla’s voice; and Bonnybell, who,
with all her numerous faults, was not devoid of generosity, found herself
unable to leave her questioner in what would be for herself an advantageous
error.
“It was not Cl—my mother’s fault,” she explained slowly; “Madame le
Roy asked her to take me away.”
“Asked her to take you away?”
Again for a moment Bonnybell hesitated. Should she “give away” her
parent, whom, after all, nothing could now harm, and tell the truth, seeing