Sir Francis Forcus was not going to allow his brother to be seen in the streets of Brockenham with any member of Mr. William Day's family, that morning. CHAPTER VI Sour Misfortune Mrs. Day, in looking back over the miserable weeks and months and years that succeeded her last New Year's party, was inclined to award the palm for wretchedness to the weeks which intervened between her husband's appearance before the magistrates and the Spring Assizes at which his trial came on. It is more than possible that if George Boult and Sir Francis Forcus had refused to stand bail for him, and he had remained for those ten weeks in prison, he would have been less unhappy there than was possible to him, a consciously guilty man, in the changed atmosphere of his home. What had happened had changed for him for ever his relations with wife and children. Among the latter he sat as one beaten, cowed, estranged. With Franky, alone, for ever again, did he approach to any intimacy. Franky, who, now that that strange talk of his father being in prison was over, and his father here at home once more, holding no apprehension of the future, troubled his head no further about the matter. Him he sometimes took upon his knee, as of old. To Franky he would give languid advice about the pictures he was colouring, about the amount of cobbler's wax to affix to the skipjack he was making, about the rigging of his walnut ships. Of Deleah--Deleah, who had been his pet, whom he had acknowledged openly to be his favourite child--he was shy. He had been told how it had been she who had arranged the matter of his bail. His little Deleah, to have gone on such an errand for him! He would have liked never to meet again those pretty trusting eyes of hers that had been full of pride in and love for him. When he had first come home she had cried heart-brokenly against him, had hung with her arms about his neck, sobbing out that she knew--she knew--she knew he had done nothing wrong. He had had to push her roughly from him. He did not wish to go through a scene like that again! To Bessie and his son, who maintained a sullen condemnatory attitude towards him, he never spoke if he could avoid doing so. Towards his wife he held an altogether different demeanour. The troubles which had come upon him had been induced by his good-natured desire to meet the heavy expenses of an extravagant household. Money which he could not earn in the legitimate exercise of his profession, nor come by honestly, had been spent. Who had had the spending of it but she--his wife? Of his grievous undoing, then, it was she who was the sole cause. Of this explanation he delivered himself to her in the first hour of his return to his home.