"The flower-man's come," said Bessie, flapping into the kitchen where Theresa was making soup. "The flower-man?" "I mean the young feller that brought them on New Year's Day." "Oh!" said Theresa, on a long, indifferent note, and stirred steadily. "Miss Terry, is he coming after you?" "I don't know, Bessie." She spoke in a voice that had the clear emptiness of a puzzled child's. "I don't know," she repeated, and then her uncouth young womanhood came strongly on her. "Oh, Bessie, Bessie, I think it's terrible to be a woman--terrible. Men--oh--and yet I know it is our destiny. Nature drives us. And I'm pushing against the chariot she sits in, pushing, pushing"--she brandished the wooden spoon--"and I know I shall be beaten in the end." "Oh, Miss Terry, you've dropped some soup on your dress. Just look at that!" "And I want to be beaten--oh, never mind the soup! It will wash out." "I'm going to wash it out now. D'you think I'd let you go upstairs like that?" When they had had supper and Morton had gone, Edward Webb and Theresa sat silently by the fire. She was happy, for Morton was better than her memory of him, and though her heart was beating fast, she was conscious of a kind of peace. She did not look at her father until he spoke. "He told me about himself," he said, and there was a tragedy of appeal in the words. They implored her to reassure him, to swear that this man had not come to take her from him. But she only nodded, looking down again. "His mother is the sister of Simon Smith, it seems. I imagine he is rich, not that he told me that, of course, but incidentally. And I think he is an honest man." There seemed to be something he had left unsaid, but before he had time to say it, she lifted her head and showed him her face aglow. He could not say the words. Instead, he put out his hands. "Theresa," he said. "Theresa." She held tightly to him, steadied her mouth against his hands, and laughed. That laughter was unmistakable: it sounded the farewell to all his hopes, and he heard them go clanging down to the very place of disappointments. CHAPTER XXII