"They HAVE worked on you; but I should have thought they'd have disgusted you. I don't care--even a little sympathy will do: whatever you've got left." He paused, looking at her, but it was a speech she had nothing for; so he went on: "There was no obligation for you to answer my questions--you might have shut me up that day with a word."

"Really?" she asked with all her grave good faith in her face. "I thought I HAD to--for fear I should appear ungrateful."

"Ungrateful?"

"Why to you--after what you had done. Don't you remember that it was you who introduced us--?" And she paused with a fatigued delicacy.

"Not to those sn.o.bs who are screaming like frightened peac.o.c.ks. I beg your pardon--I haven't THAT on my conscience!" Mr. Flack quite grandly declared.

"Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and he introduced us to--to his friends," she explained, colouring, as if it were a fault for the inexactness caused by her magnanimity. "That's why I thought I ought to tell you what you'd like."

"Why, do you suppose if I'd known where that first visit of ours to Waterlow was going to bring you out I'd have taken you within fifty miles--?" He stopped suddenly; then in another tone: "Jerusalem, there's no one like you! And you told them it was all YOU?"

"Never mind what I told them."

"Miss Francie," said George Flack, "if you'll marry me I'll never ask a question again. I'll go into some other business."

"Then you didn't do it on purpose?" Francie asked.

"On purpose?"

"To get me into a quarrel with them--so that I might be free again."

"Well, of all the blamed ideas--!" the young man gasped. "YOUR pure mind never gave birth to that--it was your sister's."

"Wasn't it natural it should occur to me, since if, as you say, you'd never consciously have been the means--"

"Ah but I WAS the means!" Mr. Flack interrupted. "We must go, after all, by what DID happen."

"Well, I thanked you when I drove with you and let you draw me out.

So we're square, aren't we?" The term Francie used was a colloquialism generally a.s.sociated with levity, but her face, as she spoke, was none the less deeply serious--serious even to pain.

"We're square?" he repeated.

"I don't think you ought to ask for anything more. Good-bye."

"Good-bye? Never!" cried George Flack, who flushed with his defeat to a degree that spoke strangely of his hopes.

Something in the way she repeated her "Goodbye!" betrayed her impression of this, and not a little withal that so much confidence left her unflattered. "Do go away!" she broke out.

"Well, I'll come back very soon"--and he took up his hat.

"Please don't--I don't like it." She had now contrived to put a wide s.p.a.ce between them.

"Oh you tormentress!" he groaned. He went toward the door, but before he reached it turned round.

"Will you tell me this anyway? ARE you going to marry the lot--after this?"

"Do you want to put that in the paper?"

"Of course I do--and say you said it!" Mr. Flack held up his head.

They stood looking at each other across the large room. "Well then--I ain't. There!"

"That's all right," he said as he went out.

XIV

When Gaston Probert came that evening he was received by Dosson and Delia, and when he asked where Francie might be was told by the latter that she would show herself in half an hour. Francie had instructed her sister that as their friend would have, first of all, information to give their father about the business he had transacted in America he wouldn't care for a lot of women in the room. When Delia reported this speech to Mr. Dosson that gentleman protested that he wasn't in any hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether Mr. Probert had a good time--whether he had liked it over there. Gaston might have liked it, but he didn't look as if he had had a very good time. His face told of reverses, of suffering; and Delia declared to him that if she hadn't received his a.s.surance to the contrary she would have believed he was right down sick. He allowed that he had been very sick at sea and was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that there was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr.

Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over their relations. The girl had schooled her father to a waiting att.i.tude on this point, and the manner in which she had descended on him in the morning, after Mr. Flack had come upstairs, was a lesson he wasn't likely soon to forget. It had been impressed on him that she was indeed wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he mustn't speak of the "piece in the paper" unless young Probert should speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why the way they felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why he had simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.

"Well, hanged if I understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you liked the piece--you think it's so queer THEY don't like it." "They," in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts in congress a.s.sembled.

"I don't think anything's queer but you!" Delia had retorted; and she had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of "handling" Mr. Flack.

"Is that so?" the old gentleman had quavered in an impotence that made him wince with a sense of meanness--meanness to his bold initiator of so many Parisian hours.

Francie's visitor came down a few minutes later and pa.s.sed through the court and out of the hotel without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been going to call after him, but Delia checked him with a violent pinch.

The unsociable manner of the young journalist's departure deepened Mr.

Dosson's dull ache over the mystery of things. I think this may be said to have been the only incident in the whole business that gave him a personal pang. He remembered how many of his cigars he had smoked with Mr. Flack and how universal a partic.i.p.ant he had made him. This haughtiness struck him as the failure of friendship--not the publication of details about the Proberts. Interwoven with Mr. Dosson's nature was the view that if these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn't pity them, and that if they hadn't done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people's knowing. It was therefore, in spite of the young man's rough exit, still in the tone of American condonation that he had observed to Delia: "He says that's what they like over there and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you've got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you've got to be with the people."

"Well, there are a good many people in the world. I don't think the Proberts are with us much."

"Oh he doesn't mean them," said Mr. Dosson.

"Well, I do!" cried Delia.

At one of the ormolu tables, near a lamp with a pink shade, Gaston insisted on making at least a partial statement. He didn't say that he might never have another chance, but Delia felt with despair that this idea was in his mind. He was very gentle, very polite, but distinctly cold, she thought; he was intensely depressed and for half an hour uttered not the least little pleasantry. There was no particular occasion for that when he talked about "preferred bonds" with her father. This was a language Delia couldn't translate, though she had heard it from childhood. He had a great many papers to show Mr. Dosson, records of the mission of which he had acquitted himself, but Mr. Dosson pushed them into the drawer of the ormolu table with the remark that he guessed they were all right. Now, after the fact, he appeared to attach but little importance to Gaston's achievements--an att.i.tude which Delia perceived to be slightly disconcerting to their visitor. Delia understood it: she had an instinctive sense that her father knew a great deal more than Gaston could tell him even about the work he had committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism, totally foreign to Mr. Dosson's domestic habits and to which he would even have imputed a certain pettifogging provinciality--treatable however with dry humour. If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least, scarcely appeared to think his services worth speaking of: an incident that left him with more of the responsibility for his cooling. What Mr. Dosson wanted to know was how everything had struck him over there, especially the Pickett Building and the parlour-cars and Niagara and the hotels he had instructed him to go to, giving him an introduction in two or three cases to the gentleman in charge of the office. It was in relation to these themes that Gaston was guilty of a want of spring, as the girl phrased it to herself; that he could produce no appreciative expression. He declared however, repeatedly, that it was a most extraordinary country--most extraordinary and far beyond anything he had had any conception of. "Of course I didn't like EVERYTHING," he said, "any more than I like everything anywhere."

"Well, what didn't you like?" Mr. Dosson enquired, at this, after a short silence.

Gaston Probert made his choice. "Well, the light for instance."

"The light--the electric?"

"No, the solar! I thought it rather hard, too much like the scratching of a slate-pencil." As Mr. Dosson hereupon looked vague and rather as if the reference were to some enterprise (a great lamp company) of which he had not heard--conveying a suggestion that he was perhaps staying away too long, Gaston immediately added: "I really think Francie might come in. I wrote to her that I wanted particularly to see her."

"I'll go and call her--I'll make her come," said Delia at the door. She left her companions together and Gaston returned to the subject of Mr.

Munster, Mr. Dosson's former partner, to whom he had taken a letter and who had shown him every sort of civility. Mr. Dosson was pleased at this; nevertheless he broke out suddenly:

"Look here, you know; if you've got anything to say that you don't think very acceptable you had better say it to ME." Gaston changed colour, but his reply was checked by Delia's quick return. She brought the news that her sister would be obliged if he would go into the little dining-room--he would find her there. She had something for his ear that she could mention only in private. It was very comfortable; there was a lamp and a fire. "Well, I guess she CAN take care of herself!" Mr.

Dosson, at this, commented with a laugh. "What does she want to say to him?" he asked when Gaston had pa.s.sed out.

"Gracious knows! She won't tell me. But it's too flat, at his age, to live in such terror."