Bernard did not know. He had not his wits sufficiently about him even to think. "I can ask my mother," he said. He was sobbing again, fallen limply against the wall, his face hidden. "Do remember you've got to play the man," George Boult said. He felt helpless in the presence of such surprising helplessness. He looked at the heaving shoulders of the youth with an astonished distaste. What was to be done with material so soft as this! "I am sorry I have been the bearer of such ill news, but there is no good in my stopping now. I'll drop in, tell your mother, when you're all more used to it. Wonderful how quickly people do get used to things! Meantime, remember, I'll stand bail for your father if you can find another. And there's no time to lose. You must shake yourself together and set about it at once." "Helpless set!" he said to himself as he let himself out and passed down the three glistening white steps into the quiet street. "Hysterical, useless, helpless set! Fit only for pleasure-seeking and money-spending. What is to become of them now?" They were certainly helpless. When Bernard went back to the room where breakfast--the meal to be for ever unfinished--stood about, and told them they had, there and then, to find some one willing to bail out his father, none of them understood, or knew what to do. "Do you know of any one we could ask, mother?" Mrs. Day sat, her brow clasped tightly in her two hands as if she really feared her head would split. "Let me think! Let me think!" she said piteously, but was incapable of thinking. "Would any of the people who were here at the dance--the Challises, the Hollingsbys, the Buttifers, the Frosts, do it? Which of them shall we ask?" "I don't think one of them would do it. They would not care." "But they're often here--to dinner, and so on." "Don't ask them." "Who then, mama?" Deleah questioned. She had made less noise than the others, and there was about her an air of purpose, lacking in the rest, although her childish face looked stricken. "There is no one I should like you to ask a favour of." "But we must ask some one." "Let it be some one we do not know, then." "Could we ask Sir Francis Forcus? He is very rich." "I will go somewhere--I will ask--some one," Mrs. Day said; but, trying to stand, she fell back in her chair, and her frightened children saw that she had fainted. They laid her on the sofa, and over her prostrate body renewed the subject of the bail. "Bessie must go," Deleah said. "Then, I won't, miss!" said Bessie, and sobbed and choked and screamed at her sister: "I won't! I won't!" "Bernard must go." "It would come better from a woman," Bernard said. In the end it was Deleah who went--the little petted, sheltered Deleah, who had never gone before on any errand of more moment than for the matching of Berlin wools, or for the changing of the three-volume novel at the Public Library.