"Deleah can't go--Deleah mustn't!" the prostrate mother on the sofa gasped. She looked like a corpse beneath the cloths soaked in eau-de-cologne-and-water which Bessie had arranged over her brow. "We can't ask Sir Francis. Call Deleah back. Stop her." But Deleah would not be stopped. It was a question of getting her father out of prison, and they had been told to lose no time. While Bessie and her mother and Bernard were still declaring she must not go she had run up to her room for her hat and jacket; and lest they should catch and stop her, she would not stay in the house to put them on, but flung them anyhow upon her when once outside the door. Then, with her little wild white face almost lost in the masses of loose dark hair escaped from the net she wore in the morning, and falling anyhow beneath her hat, and her small bare hands grasping the jacket she would not stop to button at her throat, she ran through the streets. Was that really Deleah running there, and on that errand? Deleah, who at that hour was usually walking sedately to school; saying over to herself her French poetry, perhaps, as she went, or taking a last peep in her geography book, to make sure once again of the latitude and longitude of Montreal, or to impress more firmly on her mind the imports and exports of Prussia. To get to her school she had to pass her father's office; and sometimes, if it pleased him to start early enough, he would walk there with his little daughter, her hand tucked within his arm. With her he was never savage, and rarely irritable; on these walks his mood would be playful and jocose, and they would incite each other to play the truant from office and school, and pretend they were off on a holiday jaunt together. And now her laughing, noisy, loving, boisterous father was in prison--in prison!--and she was running to beg the help of a stranger to take him out. She gave no thought to the man to whom she was going, nor to the words she would say to him. The difficulty of asking such a favour of such a stranger did not distress her. Her father--her father--her father! was her only thought. CHAPTER V Deleah's Errand It chanced that Sir Francis Forcus drove to the Brewery an hour earlier than usual that morning, and--a circumstance of rare occurrence--that Reginald was pleased to drive with him. Both men came together into the private room of the elder, where Deleah, for an hour which had seemed a lifetime, awaited them. If Sir Francis had ever seen William Day's little daughter, he had forgotten her. It was Reggie, at whom Deleah never looked, who called her name in his pleasant, good-natured tone of welcome. "Why, it is Deleah!" he cried out, as if Deleah, of all the people in the world, was the person he most wanted to see. "This is Deleah Day, Francis."