"The _other_ one! I don't know what you mean." "Sir Francis--that gave you the fifty pound. How about him?" Deleah's eyes, staring into his, dilated, her face grew whiter than his own. "I don't know what you can mean," she said. "Sir Francis Forcus and me? Me! _Me!_ Deleah Day!" She whispered the words in a kind of awe. Almost there seemed sacrilege in them. "Why not? Why not?" "I think you must be mad, Mr. Gibbon." "I am. I often am. Quite mad. Mad with love of you." "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-knob 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?