Gaston was immensely struck. "They are--they are!" he declared with enthusiasm.

"Well then, if you believe it, for heaven's sake go and marry her to-morrow!" Waterlow threw down his implements and added: "And come out of this--into the air."

Gaston, however, was planted in his path on the way to the door. "And if she goes again and does the very same?"

"The very same--?" Waterlow thought.

"I mean something else as barbarous and as hard to bear."

"Well," said Waterlow, "you'll at least have got rid of your family."

"Yes, if she lets me in again I shall be glad they're not there! They're right, pourtant, they're right," Gaston went on, pa.s.sing out of the studio with his friend.

"They're right?"

"It was unimaginable that she should."

"Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence--providence taking you off your guard to give you your chance." This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie's lover--if lover he may in his so infirm aspect be called--looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you see that she's really of the softest finest material that breathes, that she's a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the wit to conceive?"

"Ah my dear friend!"--and poor Gaston, with another of his revulsions, panted for grat.i.tude.

"The limit will be yours, not hers," Waterlow added.

"No, no, I've done with limits," his friend ecstatically cried.

That evening at ten o'clock Gaston presented himself at the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham and requested the German waiter to introduce him into the dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson's apartments and then go and tell Miss Francina he awaited her there.

"Oh you'll be better there than in the zalon--they've villed it with their luccatch," said the man, who always addressed him in an intention of English and wasn't ignorant of the tie that united the visitor to the amiable American family, or perhaps even of the modifications it had lately undergone.

"With their luggage?"

"They leave to-morrow morning--ach I don't think they themselves know for where, sir."

"Please then say to Miss Francina that I've called on the most urgent business and am extraordinarily pressed."

The special ardour possessing Gaston at that moment belonged to the order of the communicative, but perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed this exhibition of it before the young lady is better explained by the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. She at any rate entered his place of patience sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, though she corrected her prompt.i.tude a little by stopping short and drawing back when she saw how pale he was and how he looked as if he had been crying.

"I've chosen--I've chosen," he said expressively, smiling at her in denial of these indications.

"You've chosen?"

"I've had to give them up. But I like it so better than having to give YOU up! I took you first with their a.s.sent. That was well enough--it was worth trying for. But now I take you without it. We can live that way too."

"Ah I'm not worth it. You give up too much!" Francie returned. "We're going away--it's all over." She averted herself quickly, as if to carry out her meaning, but he caught her more quickly still and held her--held her fast and long. She had only freed herself when her father and sister broke in from the salon, attracted apparently by the audible commotion.

"Oh I thought you had at least knocked over the lamp!" Delia exclaimed.

"You must take me with you if you're going away, Mr. Dosson," Gaston said. "I'll start whenever you like."

"All right--where shall we go?" that amiable man asked.

"Hadn't you decided that?"

"Well, the girls said they'd tell me."

"We were going home," Francie brought out.

"No we weren't--not a wee mite!" Delia professed.

"Oh not THERE" Gaston murmured, with a look of anguish at Francie.

"Well, when you've fixed it you can take the tickets," Mr. Dosson observed with detachment.

"To some place where there are no newspapers, darling," Gaston went on.

"I guess you'll have hard work to find one," Mr. Dosson pursued.

"Dear me, we needn't read them any more. We wouldn't have read that one if your family hadn't forced us," Delia said to her prospective brother-in-law.

"Well, I shall never be forced--I shall never again in my life look at one," he very gravely declared.

"You'll see, sir,--you'll have to!" Mr. Dosson cheerfully persisted.

"No, you'll tell us enough."

Francie had kept her eyes on the ground; the others were all now rather unnaturally smiling. "Won't they forgive me ever?" she asked, looking up.

"Yes, perfectly, if you can persuade me not to stick to you. But in that case what good will their forgiveness do you?"

"Well, perhaps it's better to pay for it," the girl went on.

"To pay for it?"

"By suffering something. For it WAS dreadful," she solemnly gloomily said.

"Oh for all you'll suffer--!" Gaston protested, shining down on her.

"It was for you--only for you, as I told you," Francie returned.

"Yes, don't tell me again--I don't like that explanation! I ought to let you know that my father now declines to do anything for me," the young man added to Mr. Dosson.

"To do anything for you?"

"To make me any allowance."

"Well, that makes me feel better. We don't want your father's money, you know," this more soothable parent said with his mild st.u.r.diness.

"There'll be enough for all; especially if we economise in newspapers"--Delia carried it elegantly off.