"No! It is I who should be afraid of you; you, with your youth and beauty, and sweet and gentle goodness. I confess it—all those months you lived in my house, I was afraid."
"You said there were things between us—dividing us. You did not say what really is there. What papa did—"
As she faltered over the words there came a louder knocking upon the door, which opened almost at the same minute. Mr. Rogers's deprecating face appeared there, and behind it the face of a policeman.
"A minute, sir. I won't detain you a minute," the clerk said; and Sir Francis walked to the door with an impatient step and closed it behind him.
Deleah, left to herself—was it for an hour? was it for a minute?—looked with eyes dazed with happiness upon the hands that had been crushed in his.
"I used to think that to be loved by him would be heaven," she said. "And now—now I feel nothing. I am numb."
He came back very grave, his face unusually pale. "Your cab is waiting. I will take you home, my dear child," he said.
She crossed the big yard again at his side. The drayman was still at his horses' heads, the groom was taking the riding-horse round to the stables. On the opposite side of the yard beneath one of the arches of a heavy colonnade, a couple of policemen stood. One of them was making notes in a book. A group of workpeople stood near by; and Deleah remembered afterwards that there was about them and the rest an air of suspending something they were saying or doing while their chief and the girl at his side walked to the great entrance gates.
"A cab was waiting, by good luck," Sir Francis said as he put her in it, and Deleah awoke, it seemed to her, for the first time since he had called her name as she leant against his door, to full consciousness.
"It was mine," she said. "I took it to get to you quickly—before you started for home. I was afraid you might be hurt. A man—the man who used to lodge with us—came to me this afternoon, and he threatened you. I was so foolish—I believed he meant it. I was afraid. I thought, as you rode past his house to Cashelthorpe, he would wait there, behind the hedge, and shoot you. I seemed to see him doing it. So foolish of me! Of course he was simply frightening me; he would not dare—" She lifted the adoring eyes to his face as he sat beside her. Who would dare indeed to harm that Excellence! "I was afraid he had gone mad," she said, excusing the folly of her thought.