"Now if he was only a handsome young gentleman, and Miss Bessie could take
an interest in him, there'd be more sense," Emily remarked from her side
table.

"Don't be such a ridiculous old thing, Emily!"

"Well, he've got his kerridge!"

"And a pretty sight he looks driving in it! podgy, fat, vulgar man!"

"Miss Bessie would never look twice in that direction, I'm sure," Mr.
Gibbon declared, and Mrs. Day gave one of her now seldom heard laughs.

"How can you all talk such nonsense?" she said.

"Oh, do let us do it!" Deleah pleaded. "It so helps with the citron peel,
mama."

Deleah said very little in those days. The shock, the grief for the cruel
end of a father, for all his faults most dearly loved, told more on her
than on any of his other children. She had not felt the sense of injury
against him which had helped Bessie to support the tragedy of his death,
nor had she Bessie's engrossing preoccupations with herself, her looks,
her fancies, her love affairs. Bernard at George Boult's little branch
shop in the country town of Ingleby, chained body and soul to the heavy
drudgery of uncongenial occupation, thought of his father only with rage
and resentment. Franky, childlike, had apparently forgotten.

Deleah could not forget. Night by night her pillow was wet with tears shed
for him on whose neck she had sobbed for those never-to-be-forgotten