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 assurance 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 attitude 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 assembled.

“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 passed 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 participant 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 attitude 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 passed out.

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

“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 God 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 assurance 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 participation 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, God 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 God 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?”

“Of course it was for you.”

“Ah how strange you are!” he cried with tenderness. “Such contradictions — on s’y perd. I wish you’d say that to THEM, that way. Everything would be right.”

“Never, never!” said the girl. “I’ve wronged them, and nothing will ever be the same again. It was fatal. If I felt as they do I too would loathe the person who should have done such a thing. It doesn’t seem to me so bad — the thing in the paper; but you know best. You must go back to them. You know best,” she repeated.

“They were the last, the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of desecration, of pollution, you see”— he explained as if for conscience.

“Oh you needn’t tell me — I saw them all there!” she answered.

“It must have been a dreadful scene. But you DIDN’T brave them, did you?”

“Brave them — what are you talking about? To you that idea’s incredible!” she then hopelessly sighed.

But he wouldn’t have this. “No, no — I can imagine cases.” He clearly had SOME vision of independence, though he looked awful about it.

“But this isn’t a case, hey?” she demanded. “Well then go back to them — go back,” she repeated. At this he half-threw himself across the table to seize her hands, but she drew away and, as he came nearer, pushed her chair back, springing up. “You know you didn’t come here to tell me you’re ready to give them up.”

“To give them up?” He only echoed it with all his woe at first. “I’ve been battling with them till I’m ready to drop. You don’t know how they feel — how they MUST feel.”

“Oh yes I do. All this has made me older, every hour.”

“It has made you — so extraordinarily! — more beautiful,” said Gaston Probert.

“I don’t care. Nothing will induce me to consent to any sacrifice.”

“Some sacrifice there must be. Give me time — give me time, I’ll manage it. I only wish they hadn’t seen you there in the Bois.”

“In the Bois?”

“That Marguerite hadn&rs............