Her mother could not be allowed to marry George Boult; she could not remain in the shop. How were she and Bessie to live? With the vanity of youth, which always sees itself in the foreground, Deleah thought she perceived that it was she who must get a living for them all.
In her small distracted head she decided as she walked along that she would hire a little house, start a little school. Perhaps some one would pay the first quarter's rent, and she could pay it back when the pupils came.
"Some one" in days gone by would have meant Sir Francis; but now, living under the same roof with him, seeing in what deference he was held even by his own sister, feeling his reserve, his aloofness from the low concerns of such as she, she had become extraordinarily shy of that great man. Through the daring of ignorance, trusting in that look of serenity and nobility in his face, she had formerly approached him. She believed in his goodness still as she believed in the goodness of God, but the awe of him she had always felt had descended, since she had lived beneath his roof, in a double measure upon her.
Of his sister she had no fear. She would speak to kind Miss Forcus. Miss Forcus would tell her what to do.
Simultaneously with the formation of this resolve she arrived at the neatly trimmed hedge of Laburnum Villa. For the moment she had forgotten that the place held any interest for her beyond that of the other little houses in their gay gardens she had passed. She glanced at the bright green of the trellis-work front, at the minute weeping willow in a corner of the grass-plot, at the roseplants destined to cover arches and to grow into a bower, by and by. By the front door a clematis had been planted, and the Honourable Charles was stooping over the plant, and striving to direct, in accordance with his own idea of how it should grow, the clinging of the tendrils.
Her light step was perhaps the one step in the world whose music could have withdrawn his attention from that absorbing occupation. He rose to his feet, turning sharply round; and as she wished him good-evening he went swiftly to the gate and swung it open."
"Come in," he said. "I have been waiting for this." He had at the moment such a commanding air, that Deleah had no thought but to obey him.