Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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“You mean that my father has failed! Then that accounts, oh, that accounts for it all!”

“You don’t say that you did not know it? What did you mean and what are you talking about? Your father hasn’t—” Fortunately the question that Lucy asked did not reach Brooke’s ears, for, pushing the instrument from her across the desk, she neither cried nor raved nor wrung her hands, but sitting forward in her father’s chair, very much the attitude he took when deep in thought, scarcely stirred for the quarter-hour. The visible signs of the years she lacked of being the age she really was came swiftly, and laid their hands upon hers, not empty hands nor yet filled with the trifles the years sometimes hold. Presently Courage entered her heart, and then its sponsors, Hope and Constancy.

Soon a muffled closing of the door at the lower end of the hall, and the approaching tiptoe tread of two people of uneven weights, brought her to her feet and into the crisis again. It was Lucy, who, with every vestige of flippancy gone, threw her arms around her friend’s neck and burst into tears, while Brooke held out her hand to Mr. Dean, meanwhile, looking him straight in the eyes, saying: “Thank you for coming. Do not trouble to conceal anything, only tell me the truth, and do it quickly,” not realising that in such cases truth-telling is not the simple thing that it is reckoned.