"Oh!"

"Why do you sigh like that?"

"I so much wish you wouldn't."

"Wouldn't what?"

"Be so ridiculous."

"Is that all you have to say to me?"

"That--and good-night."

"I did not think you could be so cruel."

"I am not cruel," Deleah said; and then, quite unexpected by her, a sob rose in her throat, and it was all that she could do to keep the tears of self-pity back. "I am not cruel, but you so torment me. I want to be kind to you, but I do not want to hear about all this--which sounds so ridiculous to me. You are older than I am--you should know better. You should know how silly it is to talk to a girl like me such nonsense. And I want to go to bed, Mr. Gibbon. Will you please stand away and let me go to bed?"

He put his hand on the door-k.n.o.b as if to open it for her, but held it there. "This isn't the end," he said.

"Oh, no!" she sighed with dreary prescience.

"I am working for you from morning till night--only for you--so that I can put you in a nice house, and make a lady of you. Only for you! And all night long I can't rest for thinking of you. Mine'll be an awful night, to-night."

"Oh, Mr. Gibbon, I'm so dreadfully sorry!"

"Then, can't you say a word to me before you go? Can't you say you'll think of it?"

"Of course I shall think of it; I can't help thinking of it. But I don't wish to talk of it any more. Let me go now, will you? Let me go to bed!

Good-night, Mr. Gibbon."

"Say 'Good-night, Charlie.' They call me 'Charlie' at home."

There was no help for it if she wished to escape. "Good-night, Charlie,"

she mumbled, and rushed away to her own room, in a condition between laughing and crying which recalled Bessie's attacks.

"It is all so ridiculous!" she kept saying to herself as she undressed.

"'Good-night, Charlie!' Imagine my having called him 'Charlie.' Charlie, indeed!" She set her teeth at the remembrance. "I would rather have hit him than called him Charlie!"

But as she undressed herself the more serious side of the position presented itself for consideration. Her mother wanted her to get married--she had owned as much, and she had an absolute faith in her mother's wisdom. Did girls marry men feeling about them as she felt about this man and Reggie Forcus, she wondered? It was indisputable that men, "horrider than they," as she phrased it to herself, found quite nice girls to marry them. Ought she to take one or the other? She did not wish to--but ought she?

She got into her night-dress, brushed her hair, even said her prayers--the self-same prayers in the identical words she had said by her bedside in Queen Anne Street on the night of the New Year's party, long ago; she had not even left her father's name out of her pet.i.tions--debating these things. She slept in a tiny bedroom through Mrs. Day's, and when she got up from her knees she took her candle and went into her mother's room. "I will hear what mama has to say about it," she told herself.

Mrs. Day was lying awake in the darkness, thinking of Bernard and the dangers of India.

"Mama," Deleah said, holding the candle aloft to peer at her mother. Its light fell on her own charming face half hidden in the loose waves of curling black hair. "You aren't asleep, are you? Of course you aren't! I believe you lie there all night, staring into the shadows and thinking of miserable things! I wonder if it would really make things better, if you would like it very much, that she also has made up her mind to marry Mr.

Gibbon!"

Deleah stared for a minute, and then she laughed; and Mrs. Day saw that she laughed whole-heartedly. "Bessie takes all my young men!" she said.

"You see, mama, with the best will in the world to please you, I can't get married; so there's an end of it; and I may as well go to bed."

"Come and kiss me, dear."

Mrs. Day put a detaining arm round the girl's shoulders. "Nothing of this makes you unhappy, Deleah?"

"It only makes me want to laugh," Deleah said.

CHAPTER XXIII

Deleah Has No Dignity

A day or so after her encounter with the local magnate in the princ.i.p.al street of Brockenham, Deleah found herself, to her extreme surprise, on her way to the Hope Brewery, in response to a letter from Sir Francis Forcus, asking her to call on him there on a matter of business. He had named the afternoon hour in which she was released from school.

"I sent for you, because I wished to see you alone, and I thought it might be difficult to do so at your own house," Sir Francis said.

His address was more formal, his appearance more formidable than ever, she thought, as he indicated the chair in which he wished her to sit, and took his own seat, entrenched behind his writing-table, at some distance from her. "I hope it is not objectionable to you to come to me here, my own house being so far away?"

Deleah shyly, but quite honestly, said that she did not mind in the least.

"He is going to tell me that, after all, he has decided to buy Bernard off," she told herself, but was not allowed to maintain that illusion long.

"I have a word or two I wished to say to you about my young brother, Reginald," he said, plunging into his subject.

He sat, his face a little averted from her, looking down at the papers on his desk, and spoke in a tone as cold and non-committal as if he read what he had to say to her, written there.

Deleah receiving his communication in uncomfortable silence, he went on: "For several reasons--some of them business ones--it has been arranged for my brother to leave Brockenham for a year. To travel!"

Pausing there, she still finding nothing to say, he added, looking closer at the paper on the desk, "He will not go."

"I am sorry," Deleah shyly said.

"He won't go, because of you." Then he turned his face to her, and Deleah saw that his face expressed cold disapproval. "I am quite sure you do not wish to stand in Reginald's light, Miss Day?"

"Oh no."

"I was sure of it. And therefore I was encouraged to send for you. It will be better that we talk matters over a little. You have influence over Reggie?"

"I think not." Once or twice she had tried to impose her own ideas of what was right and fitting upon the young man, and had failed. Why should she pretend to any influence?

"But of course you have. I want to ask you to be unselfish enough to exert it for my brother's good."

"I would do that gladly if I could."

"Then, send him away. It will be doing him an inestimable benefit."

"I can tell him it would be better for him to go; but he is not easily made to do a thing he does not like.