CHAPTER VI

Sour Misfortune


Mrs. Day, in looking back over the miserable weeks and months and years
that succeeded her last New Year's party, was inclined to award the palm
for wretchedness to the weeks which intervened between her husband's
appearance before the magistrates and the Spring Assizes at which his
trial came on. It is more than possible that if George Boult and Sir
Francis Forcus had refused to stand bail for him, and he had remained for
those ten weeks in prison, he would have been less unhappy there than was
possible to him, a consciously guilty man, in the changed atmosphere of
his home.

What had happened had changed for him for ever his relations with wife and
children. Among the latter he sat as one beaten, cowed, estranged. With
Franky, alone, for ever again, did he approach to any intimacy. Franky,
who, now that that strange talk of his father being in prison was over,
and his father here at home once more, holding no apprehension of the
future, troubled his head no further about the matter. Him he sometimes
took upon his knee, as of old. To Franky he would give languid advice
about the pictures he was colouring, about the amount of cobbler's wax to
affix to the skipjack he was making, about the rigging of his walnut
ships.

Of Deleah--Deleah, who had been his pet, whom he had acknowledged openly
to be his favourite child--he was shy. He had been told how it had been