“But I must explain a little. Oh, Mr Wagram, my father is not well, not always quite responsible. His health is weak, and he has had a great deal of trouble, and might do what he would never have dreamed of doing when he was a younger and stronger man; and the temptation, I suppose, was too great.”
Her voice tailed off into a sob, and Wagram felt a great wave of pity overwhelm him as he looked at this girl, who now more than ever struck him as far too good for her sordid surroundings. Her laboured apology for her rascally old parent, too, had sent her up a hundred per cent, in his estimation, but as an excuse for the old sot it weighed not with him at all. The attempted blackmailing had been too flagrant, too outrageous, but to find that Delia was entirely innocent of it afforded him more satisfaction than he could have believed.
“Sit down, sit down. Why have you been standing all this time?” he said gently; and the tone was too much for poor Delia, who broke down utterly, and wept.
“There, there, now. Don’t give way over nothing,” he went on. “A mistake has been made, and put right again, that’s all. Meanwhile you must accept my sincere apologies for my side of it.”
“Apologies! Mr Wagram, don’t. Apologies! Why, I have been feeling as if I could never look you in the face again.”
“But you don’t feel that any more, of course not. Now, I know my father would like to see you, so I will let him know you are here, if you will excuse me for a minute or two.”
As the door closed on him Delia brushed away her tears, and then did an inexplicable, a foolish thing. She rose and pressed her lips to the table, on the spot where his hand had rested during the interview.
“And they would have had me extort money from him, blackmail him!” she said to herself. “Faugh! what a horrible word. But the whole thing was horrible, shameful. Oh, but the tactfulness of him! It was wonderful. No wonder such people seem to reckon themselves a separate order of being. They are.”
Meanwhile Wagram had found the old Squire in the library.
“The poor girl had no hand in it after all,” he said. “It appears she knew nothing about it until this morning, when she received the cheque. The whole thing was got up by her rascally father without her knowledge.”