"Miss Bessie would never look twice in that direction, I'm sure," Mr. Gibbon declared, and Mrs. Day gave one of her now seldom heard laughs. "How can you all talk such nonsense?" she said. "Oh, do let us do it!" Deleah pleaded. "It so helps with the citron peel, mama." Deleah said very little in those days. The shock, the grief for the cruel end of a father, for all his faults most dearly loved, told more on her than on any of his other children. She had not felt the sense of injury against him which had helped Bessie to support the tragedy of his death, nor had she Bessie's engrossing preoccupations with herself, her looks, her fancies, her love affairs. Bernard at George Boult's little branch shop in the country town of Ingleby, chained body and soul to the heavy drudgery of uncongenial occupation, thought of his father only with rage and resentment. Franky, childlike, had apparently forgotten. Deleah could not forget. Night by night her pillow was wet with tears shed for him on whose neck she had sobbed for those never-to-be-forgotten minutes of his last night on earth. She tortured herself with a secret, unearned remorse. Forgetting her habitual love and dutifulness, her mind would dwell on some remembered occasion when she told herself she had failed him. When she had pretended not to notice a hand held out for hers, or had shirked some little service she might have done him. Of none such small sins against him had the father been aware, but she was tormented by the belief that she had wounded him. He seemed ever to be looking at her with reproachful eyes. She forgot his ill temper, his unlovableness, his want of consideration for any one but himself, during the last wretched weeks of his sojourn among them, and saw him only as he had been upon that last night before his trial, heard always the great sob which had seemed to rend his chest as she had leant upon it. Her seventeenth birthday was past now, and it seemed to her mother that her young daughter had grown of a still more exceeding prettiness. Poor Mrs. Day often longed for a sympathetic ear into which to breathe her maternal admiration. With Bessie the subject of Deleah's beauty was like a red rag to a bull. Emily, the general and confidential friend of the family, was not an altogether satisfactory confidante on that matter, because in her eyes, blinded by affection, the whole family was equally beautiful. "You've got handsome children, ma'am. I've knowed it since folk used to crowd round my pram to have a look at them when I wheeled 'em out, times gone by, as babies. Ofttimes the pavement got blocked, as you've heard me mention before. There's no two opinions about their looks, and we know which side they got them from." There were no two opinions about that, at any rate. Not even the most charitable critic could have credited poor William Day with good looks; and the tired pathetic face of his widow was a handsome face still. CHAPTER XI The Attractive Bessie