“Oh—people!” said Charlotte Lovell wearily.

Her married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her voice that Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice, before. Its echo seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the Axminster carpet actually heaved under Delia’s shrinking slippers.

Charlotte Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the pale brown of her eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there when she was angry or excited.

“Charlotte—where on earth have you come from?” she questioned, drawing the girl down to the sofa.

“Come from?{28}”

{28}

“Yes. You look as if you had seen a ghost—an army of ghosts.”

The same snarling smile drew up Charlotte’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she said.

“Well?—Oh, Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t mean to say that you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past—? Not that I’ve ever heard the least hint; never. But even if there were....” She drew a deep breath, and bravely proceeded to extremities. “Even if you’ve heard that he’s been ... that he’s had a child—of course he would have provided for it before....”

The girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’; but it’s not that.”

“Tell me what it is.”

Charlotte Lovell looked about the sunny prosperous room as if it were the image of her world, and that world{29} were a prison she must break out of. She lowered her head. “I want—to get away,” she panted.

{29}

“Get away? From Joe?”

“From his ideas—the Ralston ideas.”

Delia bridled—after all, she was a Ralston! “The Ralston ideas? I haven’t found them—so unbearably unpleasant to live with,” she smiled a little tartly.

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