"You are making personal remarks, Mr. Boult. No gentleman can make personal remarks to a lady unless they are complimentary—" and so on.
When Deleah went away it seemed that Bessie blossomed out into greater attractiveness. Perhaps in the restricted spaces of Bridge Street there had not been room enough or air enough for the development of both sisters; or it may have been that Deleah, with her superior beauty and winsomeness, shone the other down, and that Bessie had been conscious of the fact. Certainly she grew more amiable, more useful, even grew prettier and more lovable. And George Boult came often, and more often. Hardly a night that he did not come.
The business, not paying, must be disposed of; there was no absolute cause for hurry; Mrs. Day could hang on till an advantageous offer was made, Mr. Boult decided. The house, open to receive him whenever it pleased him to go, suited him. He liked the long narrow sitting-room above the shop, with its fireplace at one end, and its three deep-seated windows at the other, where he could sit now as in his own home, and talk to Bessie wilfully idle, or Bessie pretending to sew—always Bessie pleasant to look upon, and oddly stimulating, with her daring treatment of him.
Deleah gone, Franky gone, it was very snug there, especially when the winter evenings came on, and the poor widow stayed late in her shop while he and Bessie sat and "chaffed," as he called it, alone.
How she dared! he often asked himself. To think of all the benefits he had bestowed on the family, and that she dared!
"What would have become of you all if I had not got up that subscription-list, and started you in business?" he asked her.
"What's going to become of us now that the money is spent, and the business has failed?" she retorted.
"You leave that to me," he told her, and as good as promised that the future of the family was safe with him. He expected her, perhaps, to be overcome with gratitude; instead of which she gave him a not unneeded lesson in manners, advising him that a person of so much importance should not demean himself by blowing his own trumpet.
In the sitting-room over the shop was no attraction for Charles Gibbon, Deleah's light figure and darling face being absent from it. He could afford a house very well now. Not the grand house of which Deleah had spoken, but one which would suffice to his modest wants. A house with a big garden beyond, where, supposing a lady ever came to live there who was fond of flowers, roses might be grown, honeysuckle, jessamine trained. A garden where a bower could be constructed large enough for two who could eat their strawberries there, in season, or drink a glass of wine there, on a Sunday afternoon. Far out of the town, for choice, on a road at whose gate some one might stand watching the departure of the master, as he went to work in the morning, welcoming him when he returned at night.
In his spare hours he occupied himself in looking for such a retreat, and when the ideal one was found he left his rooms in Bridge Street and went to live there.