The Cold-Hearted Fates
When Mrs. Day and her daughters had retired that night, their boarder sat up writing a letter.
Deleah found it pushed under her plate at breakfast the next morning,
Gibbon always breakfasting early and alone.
"I think you behaved nobly," the letter ran. "Do not heed what others in their spite and jealousy may say. The man Forcus is a purse-proud snob. But if as such he is too proud to receive you into his family, remember that there is another that have better taste. My family is highly respectable, but they would receive you gladly, for my sake. And as for me, I should always think you did me honour by becoming mine. Which honour I pray you, my beloved Deleah, to do me."
Deleah crumpled the note in her hand—she was down before her mother and sister, that morning—and took it into the kitchen where Emily was making the breakfast toast, and rammed it, with the poker, and a good will, into the heart of the glowing coals.
She thought as she did so of the talk with her mother the other night in which the name of the Honourable Charles had figured. She had only half meant what she had said then, but now—how could she ever so lightly have contemplated for one moment such a marriage!
"And what young chap's love-letter are you a-burnin' of now, Miss Deleah?" Emily facetiously inquired, waving the round of toast gracefully before the bars.
"The love-letter of a young chap who should never trust himself to write one," Deleah told her, calmly. "His love-letter was abominable, Emily."
She had a love-letter of another sort that morning. It was brought to her, and given in the presence of her pupils at the mal à propos moment when Miss Chaplin had unexpectedly entered the little class-room in which the juniors were taught, and where was Deleah's domain. Miss Chaplin had thought that she had heard laughter issuing from this direction, and had burst into the room to beg of Miss Day to keep the children in order.
Poor Miss Day was desperately anxious to retain her post in Miss Chaplin's Academy, and for that reason, and because Miss Chaplin was quite aware of the fact, she found it safe and convenient to make of the poor young teacher the scapegoat for whatever irregularities were committed in the school, to discharge upon her the pent-up irritabilities she dared not vent upon the more valuable assistants, who might resent such ebullitions at inconvenient times.