"I'm sure I wish he would keep there!" Bessie would declare. She thought the Honourable Charles was jealous; for with the elder daughter the draper had come to indulge in a kind of heavy badinage which may have gratified George Boult, and apparently was not displeasing to Bessie, but which those who looked on must have found fatiguing. Bessie always pretended to be bored by these encounters of wit with the fat, bald-headed man who had been her father's contemporary: "You have no right to yawn when I am talking to you, Miss Bessie," he would reprove her. "Why do you do it?" "Because I am tired." "You mean because you are tired of my company? That is not the reason you yawn, however. You yawn because you have indigestion." "I? Indigestion? What makes you think so, pray? Do I look like indigestion? Have I spots on my face, or a red nose?" "No, but you are growing fat. You eat too much." "Mr. Boult, how _dare_ you!" "You eat too much, and work too little. You don't take exercise enough to digest your food." "You are making personal remarks, Mr. Boult. No gentleman can make personal remarks to a lady unless they are complimentary--" and so on. When Deleah went away it seemed that Bessie blossomed out into greater attractiveness. Perhaps in the restricted spaces of Bridge Street there had not been room enough or air enough for the development of both sisters; or it may have been that Deleah, with her superior beauty and winsomeness, shone the other down, and that Bessie had been conscious of the fact. Certainly she grew more amiable, more useful, even grew prettier and more lovable. And George Boult came often, and more often. Hardly a night that he did not come. The business, not paying, must be disposed of; there was no absolute cause for hurry; Mrs. Day could hang on till an advantageous offer was made, Mr. Boult decided. The house, open to receive him whenever it pleased him to go, suited him. He liked the long narrow sitting-room above the shop, with its fireplace at one end, and its three deep-seated windows at the other, where he could sit now as in his own home, and talk to Bessie wilfully idle, or Bessie pretending to sew--always Bessie pleasant to look upon, and oddly stimulating, with her daring treatment of him. Deleah gone, Franky gone, it was very snug there, especially when the winter evenings came on, and the poor widow stayed late in her shop while he and Bessie sat and "chaffed," as he called it, alone. How she dared! he often asked himself. To think of all the benefits he had bestowed on the family, and that she dared! "What would have become of you all if I had not got up that subscription-list, and started you in business?" he asked her. "What's going to become of us now that the money is spent, and the business has failed?" she retorted.