She shook her head, looking at him with eyes which implored him not to be bitter or unhappy. And as she looked, seeing the familiar red face and squat strong figure of him in a new light an idea struck her. "Mr. Gibbon," she said, "it was _you_ who sent the concert tickets, and all the flowers and fruit, and the canary in its lovely cage. It was you--you!" "No, no! Mr. Boult, of course, Miss Deleah. You found out who it was, long ago. Kind, generous Mr. Boult!" "And I took them all, and never thanked you--!" She put out a hand to delay him as he walked past her to the door; but he took no heed, and without another word she let him go. "What have you done with your roses?" Deleah asked. Bessie tucked in her plump chin and looked down upon the place beneath her jacket collar where they had been pinned. "I must have lost them coming out of church!" she said. "Pray do not let the Honourable Charles hear of it." The three poor roses! Deleah's roses, the boarder had tramped the ten miles to get for her! CHAPTER XVI For Bernard Sir Francis Forcus was standing with his back to the empty fireplace in his private room at the Brewery, a copy of the local daily newspaper in his hand. It was a pleasant room, although the view from the two open windows was only of the tall black wharves and warehouses across the way. You must lean from the window to catch sight of the black river flowing beneath, upon which the Brewery was built; of the great wherries and barges unloading below; to see the canoes and pleasure boats, escaping from the polluted waters, the bricks and mortars of the locality, to the sunlit stream flowing between fair gardens and green pastures of the country, a half-mile farther on. From a window in one of the black, ill-looking wharves across the way an imprisoned lark was singing, rewarding man for his cruel treatment with the best he had to give, after the manner of the brute creation, whose avenging is not yet. A ray of sunlight straggling in--in more open, more favoured localities, the sun lay broadly over all on that spring morning--touched the face of Sir Francis, which wore a by no means well-pleased expression. In the paper he was reading, wet from the press, was an account of a steeplechase in which his brother's name had largely figured. He had not won the race, nor distinguished himself in any way, except by the number and severity of his falls, and the fact that he had killed his horse; but the _Brockenham Star_ was, to a large extent, the property of the firm of big brewers, and had therefore made the most of the young man's exploits. "The boy will break his neck yet," the reader said to himself. He was not largely in his brother's confidence. The death of the horse was news to him; he had not even known there was a steeplechase.