brick-rose circles again visible under darkly shadowed lids. Just so, she remembered,{78} poor cousin So-and-so had looked the week before she sailed for Italy!
{78}
“Delia!” Charlotte breathed.
Delia drew near the bed, and stood looking down at her cousin with new eyes. Yes: it had been easy enough, the night before, to dispose of Chatty’s future as if it were her own. But now?
“Darling—”
“Oh, begin, please,” the girl interrupted, “or I shall know that what’s coming is too dreadful!”
“Chatty, dearest, if I promised you too much—”
“Jim won’t let you take my child? I knew it! Shall I always go on dreaming things that can never be?”
Delia, her tears running down, knelt by the bed and gave her fresh hand into the other’s burning clutch.{79}
{79}
“Don’t think that, dear: think only of what you’d like best....”
“Like best?” The girl sat up sharply against her pillows, alive to the hot fingertips.
“You can’t marry Joe, dear—can you—and keep little Tina?” Delia continued.
“Not keep her with me, no: but somewhere where I could slip off to see her—oh, I had hoped such follies!”
“Give up follies, Charlotte. Keep her where? See your own child in secret? Always in dread of disgrace? Of wrong to your other children? Have you ever thought of that?”
“Oh, my poor head won’t think! You’re trying to tell me that I must give her up?”
“No, dear; but that you must not marry Joe.”
Charlotte sank back on the pillow, her eyes half-closed. “I tell you I must make{80} my child a home. Delia, you’re too blest to understand!”
{80}
“Think yourself blest too, Chatty. You shan’t give up your baby. She shall live with you: you shall take care of her—for me.”
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