they were getting excited." My
mother always glossed a disagreeable truth over to herself in that way.
She never said, "Your father has had too much to drink," though he had
at least once a week, but it was always, "Your father is excited,"
or "over-tired." My poor mother; I have learned to pity her for those
deceptions that deceived nobody, since I have grown older and wiser.
Still, that night she was hard on me. Perhaps because she felt I had
been hardly dealt with, and she had nobody else to vent her anger on.
That is the way with some people.

"Don't be silly, now, and cry," she said, for I had flung myself down
on my little bed, and was vainly trying to suppress the sobs that would
come, "It's not the least good in the world to cry. You shouldn't have
stopped so long. It's entirely your own fault. You have nobody to blame
but yourself. There, there, for heaven's sake, child, don't cry like
that, they 'll have forgotten all about it to-morrow morning, when their
heads are clear. I don't know what was the matter with Dick Stanton, I
never saw him so excited."

I could have told her, but I held my peace, and she went away, and I
cried myself to sleep.

But the matter was not forgotten next day, for my father told us, as if
it were a huge joke, that he had bet me against a hundred pounds that
Boatman could win the grass-fed steeplechase.

"So you see," he said, laughing at the recollection, "it cuts both ways.
If I lose I get my daughter comfortably settled in life, and if I win I
'm at least 100L. to the good."

I looked at my mother appealingly, but she only shook her head. My
father was not a man whose whims could be lightly crossed, and she would
not let me even try. Ashamed! oh, child! I was never so ashamed in my
life! I hung my head all day and was afraid even to look the servant
maid in the face. I felt she must despise a girl whose own father held
her so lightly, And Paul, there 's where the hardest part of all came.
How was I to tell my lover what my father had done? And how was I not
to tell him, for I knew that Dick Stanton was not the man to keep such a
wager to himself; he would bruit it abroad, if it were only for the sake
of angering his rival. I was ashamed, ashamed, ashamed. It seemed to me
I could never hold up my head again, and oh, how was I to meet Paul! I
thought of nothing else for the next two days, and I had not a chance
of seeing him or telling him, for posts were not in those days. And