Deleah listened miserably, pretending not to hear. She did not agree with Bessie's idea of what was dignified, but she knew that she had cut a poor figure. She felt humiliated, hurt, helpless. Sir Francis Forcus had been for her her ideal of what a man and a gentleman should be. He had helped her in the day of her necessity, and she had set him at once as her hero on a pinnacle, and had looked up to him and worshipped him secretly, and from afar. She knew that she had sat before him this afternoon shamed, and helpless, and childish; filled with as much sorrow for him who was so clumsily wounding her as for herself. She had not desired to retaliate; she would not have been revenged on him if she could; the only effort of which she had been capable had been the effort to make him think that she had been as little wounded as possible, that the situation was not a horrible one to her. Yet when they asked her why she had not shown more spirit she could not explain. She could only sit silent and miserable, and let them talk. Even Mr. Gibbon, usually so preoccupied and silent now, talked. He said that he supposed Sir Francis Forcus called hisself a gentleman, but that he, the Manchester man, had always had his doubts on the subject, and that one day he hoped for the opportunity of telling him that he was a _snob_. And more, with unwanted, stammering loquacity, to that effect, with fire of eye, with un-called-for, excited repetition. CHAPTER XXIV The Cold-Hearted Fates When Mrs. Day and her daughters had retired that night, their boarder sat up writing a letter. Deleah found it pushed under her plate at breakfast the next morning, Gibbon always breakfasting early and alone. "I think you behaved nobly," the letter ran. "Do not heed what others in their spite and jealousy may say. The man Forcus is a purse-proud snob. But if as such he is too proud to receive you into his family, remember that there is another that have better taste. My family is highly respectable, but they would receive you gladly, for my sake. And as for me, I should always think you did me honour by becoming mine. Which honour I pray you, my beloved Deleah, to do me." Deleah crumpled the note in her hand--she was down before her mother and sister, that morning--and took it into the kitchen where Emily was making the breakfast toast, and rammed it, with the poker, and a good will, into the heart of the glowing coals. She thought as she did so of the talk with her mother the other night in which the name of the Honourable Charles had figured. She had only half meant what she had said then, but now--how could she ever so lightly have contemplated for one moment such a marriage! "And what young chap's love-letter are you a-burnin' of now, Miss Deleah?" Emily facetiously inquired, waving the round of toast gracefully before the bars.