Now, it befell that on the following morning, while moving her post-card albums, Delia dropped several loose cards. Upon these pounced Bob, with no intention of picking them up for her, we may be sure, possibly in the hope of causing her some passing annoyance by scattering them still more; but hardly had he bent down with that amiable object than he started back, as though he had been about to pick up a snake unawares. “What—why? Who the deuce is that?” he cried. One of the cards was lying with the picture face upwards. This he now picked up. “Who is it?” he stammered, staring wildly at it. “Don’t you recognise it, or does it bring back painful recollections?” retorted Delia as she watched him blankly gaping at the portrait card which Yvonne had given her. For upon her a new light had dawned. “Don’t you? You should have good reason to,” she went on mercilessly, her eyes full upon his face. “Isn’t it Miss Haldane? You know—and I know—who it was that insulted her on the Swanton road one day, but Mr Haldane doesn’t know—as yet.” Bob’s face had gone white.
“Hang it all, Delia,” he gasped, “you wouldn’t give your own brother away, surely?”
“My own brother has just given himself away,” was the sneering reply. “Brother! Yes. You have been very brotherly to me of late, haven’t you—trying to drive me from the house, and making all sorts of perfectly scandalous insinuations! Very brotherly? Eh?”
“Oh, well, perhaps I said a good deal more than I meant,” grumbled Bob shamefacedly.
“And you’d have gone on doing the same if it hadn’t been for finding that card,” she pursued, not in the least deceived by an apology extorted through sheer scare. “Well, please yourself as to whether you do so or not, now.”
Thus the abominable Bob’s turn had come, and so far as he was concerned Delia was henceforward left in peace. Bob, then, being reduced Clytie judged the time ripe for reducing her father also.
“See here, dad,” she began one day when the old man was grumbling at his eldest daughter, and suggesting for the twentieth time that she had better clear out and do something for herself, “don’t you think we have had about enough nagging over that cheque business?—because if you don’t, I do.”
“Oh, you do, do you, Miss Hoity Toity?”
“Rather. And I move that we have no more of it—that the matter be allowed to drop, as they say in the House.”
“What the devil d’you mean, you impudent baggage?” snarled her father.