After the second visit she had something more definite to relate. "I hope you will approve, but if you don't it can't be helped," she said, "for the thing is arranged. That younger girl, Deleah, is coming here."
"Here? On a visit, you mean?"
"She is coming to be my companion. It is the only way I can discover in which we can be of use to them. The poor child has been receiving fifteen pounds a year. I can give her fifty—"
"You haven't forgotten how that young fool, Reggie, made a bigger fool of himself over this girl. Would have married her, I suppose, but for the extraordinarily decent way the young woman behaved about it."
"Luckily Reggie is away," Ada comforted herself. "He'll have been in love a dozen times over before he comes back again."
"But what are you going to do with the girl? Won't it bore you to have her always about? You have never wanted a companion before."
"How do you know I have not?" his sister asked him laughing. "I didn't know it myself, but I expect I've wanted one all the time. At last I'm going to have one."
There was in Ada Forcus that ineradicable love of gaiety which some women carry to the grave. Since, at the death of his wife, she had gone to keep house for her brother small indulgence had been shown to this passion. In the grave of his wife, not only all Sir Francis's heart had been buried, but apparently the love of all that made for the brightness of life. By the time the poignancy of his sorrow had worn off, to be solemn and sad of demeanour, to shun the disturbing effects of social distraction, had become second nature to him. By no wish of his own, but naturally and irresistibly, that habit of melancholy which had fallen on its master seemed to enshroud his home. He liked his brother to be with him in the home in which he had been born, but he would not welcome his brother's friends. He was greatly attached to the sister, who was half a dozen years older than himself, but the idea that she could desire any other company than his own, had not apparently presented itself.
"There are some things a man can never learn," the mid-Victorian Ada said to herself, when Sir Francis prophesied that she would find a companion a bore. "And one is that a woman, however happily situated in a man's house, must have another woman easy of access to talk with, to sew with, to whisper to."