"In such terror?"

"Why of your father. You've got to choose."

"How, to choose?"

"Why if there's a person you like and he doesn't like."

"You mean you can't choose your father," said Mr. Dosson thoughtfully.

"Of course you can't."

"Well then please don't like any one. But perhaps _I_ should like him,"

he added, faithful to his easier philosophy.

"I guess you'd have to," said Delia.

In the small salle-a-manger, when Gaston went in, Francie was standing by the empty table, and as soon as she saw him she began.

"You can't say I didn't tell you I should do something. I did nothing else from the first--I mean but tell you. So you were warned again and again. You knew what to expect."

"Ah don't say THAT again; if you knew how it acts on my nerves!" the young man groaned. "You speak as if you had done it on purpose--to carry out your absurd threat."

"Well, what does it matter when it's all over?"

"It's not all over. Would to G.o.d it were!"

The girl stared. "Don't you know what I sent for you to come in here for? To bid you good-bye."

He held her an instant as if in unbelievable view, and then "Francie, what on earth has got into you?" he broke out. "What deviltry, what poison?" It would have been strange and sad to an observer, the opposition of these young figures, so fresh, so candid, so meant for confidence, but now standing apart and looking at each other in a wan defiance that hardened their faces.

"Don't they despise me--don't they hate me? You do yourself! Certainly you'll be glad for me to break off and spare you decisions and troubles impossible to you."

"I don't understand; it's like some hideous dream!" Gaston Probert cried. "You act as if you were doing something for a wager, and you make it worse by your talk. I don't believe it--I don't believe a word of it."

"What don't you believe?" she asked.

"That you told him--that you told him knowingly. If you'll take that back (it's too monstrous!) if you'll deny it and give me your a.s.surance that you were practised upon and surprised, everything can still be arranged."

"Do you want me to lie?" asked Francie Dosson. "I thought you'd like pleasant words."

"Oh Francie, Francie!" moaned the wretched youth with tears in his eyes.

"What can be arranged? What do you mean by everything?" she went on.

"Why they'll accept it; they'll ask for nothing more. It's your partic.i.p.ation they can't forgive."

"THEY can't? Why do you talk to me of 'them'? I'm not engaged to 'them'!" she said with a shrill little laugh.

"Oh Francie _I_ am! And it's they who are buried beneath that filthy rubbish!"

She flushed at this characterisation of Mr. Flack's epistle, but returned as with more gravity: "I'm very sorry--very sorry indeed. But evidently I'm not delicate."

He looked at her, helpless and bitter. "It's not the newspapers in your country that would have made you so. Lord, they're too incredible! And the ladies have them on their tables."

"You told me we couldn't here--that the Paris ones are too bad," said Francie.

"Bad they are, G.o.d knows; but they've never published anything like that--poured forth such a flood of impudence on decent quiet people who only want to be left alone."

Francie sank to a chair by the table as if she were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms spread out on the lamplit plush she looked up at him. "Was it there you saw it?"

He was on his feet opposite, and she made at this moment the odd reflexion that she had never "realised" he had such fine lovely uplifted eyebrows. "Yes, a few days before I sailed. I hated them from the moment I got there--I looked at them very little. But that was a chance. I opened the paper in the hall of an hotel--there was a big marble floor and spittoons!--and my eyes fell on that horror. It made me ill."

"Did you think it was me?" she patiently gaped.

"About as soon as I supposed it was my father. But I was too mystified, too tormented."

"Then why didn't you write to me, if you didn't think it was me?"

"Write to you? I wrote to you every three days," he cried.

"Not after that."

"Well, I may have omitted a post at the last--I thought it might be Delia," Gaston added in a moment.

"Oh she didn't want me to do it--the day I went with him, the day I told him. She tried to prevent me," Francie insisted.

"Would to G.o.d then she had!" he wailed.

"Haven't you told them she's delicate too?" she asked in her strange tone.

He made no answer to this; he only continued: "What power, in heaven's name, has he got over you? What spell has he worked?"

"He's a gay old friend--he helped us ever so much when we were first in Paris."

"But, my dearest child, what 'gaieties,' what friends--what a man to know!"

"If we hadn't known him we shouldn't have known YOU. Remember it was Mr.

Flack who brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow's."

"Oh you'd have come some other way," said Gaston, who made nothing of that.

"Not in the least. We knew nothing about any other way. He helped us in everything--he showed us everything. That was why I told him--when he asked me. I liked him for what he had done."

Gaston, who had now also seated himself, listened to this attentively.

"I see. It was a kind of delicacy."

"Oh a 'kind'!" She desperately smiled.

He remained a little with his eyes on her face. "Was it for me?"