"Helpless set!" he said to himself as he let himself out and passed down the three glistening white steps into the quiet street. "Hysterical, useless, helpless set! Fit only for pleasure-seeking and money-spending. What is to become of them now?"
They were certainly helpless. When Bernard went back to the room where breakfast--the meal to be for ever unfinished--stood about, and told them they had, there and then, to find some one willing to bail out his father, none of them understood, or knew what to do.
"Do you know of any one we could ask, mother?" Mrs. Day sat, her brow clasped tightly in her two hands as if she really feared her head would split. "Let me think! Let me think!" she said piteously, but was incapable of thinking.
"Would any of the people who were here at the dance--the Challises, the Hollingsbys, the Buttifers, the Frosts, do it? Which of them shall we ask?"
"I don't think one of them would do it. They would not care."
"But they're often here--to dinner, and so on."
"Who then, mama?" Deleah questioned. She had made less noise than the others, and there was about her an air of purpose, lacking in the rest, although her childish face looked stricken.
"There is no one I should like you to ask a favour of."
"Let it be some one we do not know, then."
"Could we ask Sir Francis Forcus? He is very rich."
"I will go somewhere--I will ask--some one," Mrs. Day said; but, trying to stand, she fell back in her chair, and her frightened children saw that she had fainted.
They laid her on the sofa, and over her prostrate body renewed the subject of the bail.
"Then, I won't, miss!" said Bessie, and sobbed and choked and screamed at her sister: "I won't! I won't!"
"It would come better from a woman," Bernard said.
In the end it was Deleah who went--the little petted, sheltered Deleah, who had never gone before on any errand of more moment than for the matching of Berlin wools, or for the changing of the three-volume novel at the Public Library.
"Deleah can't go--Deleah mustn't!" the prostrate mother on the sofa gasped. She looked like a corpse beneath the cloths soaked in eau-de-cologne-and-water which Bessie had arranged over her brow. "We can't ask Sir Francis. Call Deleah back. Stop her."