"How do you know I have not?" his sister asked him laughing. "I didn't know it myself, but I expect I've wanted one all the time. At last I'm going to have one." There was in Ada Forcus that ineradicable love of gaiety which some women carry to the grave. Since, at the death of his wife, she had gone to keep house for her brother small indulgence had been shown to this passion. In the grave of his wife, not only all Sir Francis's heart had been buried, but apparently the love of all that made for the brightness of life. By the time the poignancy of his sorrow had worn off, to be solemn and sad of demeanour, to shun the disturbing effects of social distraction, had become second nature to him. By no wish of his own, but naturally and irresistibly, that habit of melancholy which had fallen on its master seemed to enshroud his home. He liked his brother to be with him in the home in which he had been born, but he would not welcome his brother's friends. He was greatly attached to the sister, who was half a dozen years older than himself, but the idea that she could desire any other company than his own, had not apparently presented itself. "There are some things a man can never learn," the mid-Victorian Ada said to herself, when Sir Francis prophesied that she would find a companion a bore. "And one is that a woman, however happily situated in a man's house, must have another woman easy of access to talk with, to sew with, to whisper to." CHAPTER XXVI A Householder When it was explained to her that a man was to be put into the shop to give her a holiday, Mrs. Day refused the indulgence. Her heart was broken, but she was not ill. To have had a little time to give to Franky--to take him for walks in the country, to read to him, to help him with his favourite occupation of painting old numbers of the _Illustrated News_ and _Punch_ would have been a joy. Often she had longed for the leisure to do these things. But now that Franky was gone, where was the use of leisure? She did not even want the leisure to cry. She who had wept so often in this latest sorrow could shed no tears. Deleah cried, wetting the pillow nightly with her tears. When talking of matters quite unconnected with the lost child the tears would come welling up, drowning the beautiful hazel eyes; would tremble, as she tried to go on talking, on the thick black lashes; would roll, she pretending not to notice, down her cheeks. Bessie cried--howled, even, lying with her face buried in the sofa cushion, calling in a smothered voice upon Franky's name. Emily cried, cleaning with spirits of ammonia the shabby school suit whose odour had so offended the nostrils of the elder sister. Putting yet another patch in the hinder portions of the trousers, the only use of such labours being that it delayed the laying away of the little garments for ever.