"Yes, yes, my dear. Pray don't excite yourself again, Bessie."
"So, if Deleah persists in taking Reggie—and she'll richly deserve all she'll get with him—I shall make up my mind to Gibbon."
"Mr. Gibbon, Bessie."
"Mr. Gibbon, then. I don't think he's a man to be ashamed of, do you?"
"Certainly not. I believe he is quite a steady and honourable young man. A little moody, perhaps—"
"There's a cause for that. And if Deleah, when she's Mrs. Forcus, is ashamed of him it won't matter to me, because I'm ashamed of Deleah, and so I mean to tell her when she comes home."
"And you think that Mr. Gibbon means—?"
Bessie gave a scornful laugh: "If you haven't eyes in your head to see, mama, ask Emily!"
Ah, if these things might be! Mrs. Day thought as she descended again to her duties behind the counter. If only her girls could find homes for themselves, how thankful she would be. For the business was doing badly; all the customers who were worth keeping had fallen away; the little capital she had had in hand had dwindled, disappeared. In that morning's paper she had read that the regiment in which Bernard had enlisted was ordered to India. Too late now to buy him off, even if she had been permitted to do so. If she had not been compelled to show a calm face above her counter she would have passed the day in tears at the thought of the privations and sufferings before her boy. Her poor young Bernard.
So tired she was of it all: of smiling, with tears raining upon her heart, of listening to the complaints of customers, the grievance of poor Bessie upstairs—poor unreasonable, self-centred Bessie, whom yet she so loved—when she was herself like to drown in trouble. If only the girls could find homes—Deleah she knew would provide for Franky—she would shut up the hateful shop, would give up the humiliating struggle—she being an earthen vessel—to swim with the hateful Coman who was of iron. She would then, she thought, go to bed and to sleep, and would sleep and sleep, and never get up again. Orthodox Christian as she was, in her anxious, worried, and wearied existence the joys of Heaven did not tempt her so much as the possibility of enjoying a long, uninterrupted sleep.