Page:Old New York 2 The Old Maid.djvu/79

 know. Delia’s right; she always is. Better get it over—better face the music now than later.”

“Now than later,” Joe echoed with a tortured grin; and it occurred to Delia that never before in the course of his easy good-natured life had he had—any more than her Jim—to give up anything his heart was set on. Even the vocabulary of renunciation, and its conventional gestures, were unfamiliar to him.

“But I don’t understand. I can’t give her up,” he declared, blinking away a boyish tear.

“Think of the children, my dear fellow; it’s your duty,” Jim insisted, checking a glance of pride at Delia’s wholesome comeliness.

In the long conversation that followed between the cousins—argument, counter-argument, sage counsel and hopeless Rh