weeks, rather than accept the hospitality of
any member of his family. Mr. Dosson, on his side, was grateful for the
solution; he remarked "Well, sir, you've got a big brain" at the end of
a morning they spent with papers and pencils; and on this Gaston made
his preparations to sail. Before he left Paris Francie, to do her
justice, confided to him that her objection to going in such an intimate
way even to Mme. de Brecourt's had been founded on a fear that in close
quarters she might do something that would make them all despise her.
Gaston replied, in the first place, ardently, that this was the very
delirium of delicacy, and that he wanted to know in the second if she
expected never to be at close quarters with "tous les siens." "Ah yes,
but then it will be safer," she pleaded; "then we shall be married and
by so much, shan't we? be beyond harm." In rejoinder to which he had
simply kissed her; the passage taking place three days before her lover
took ship. What further befell in the brief interval was that, stopping
for a last word at the Hotel de l'Univers et the Cheltenham on his
way to catch the night express to London--he was to sail from
Liverpool--Gaston found Mr. George Flack sitting in the red-satin
saloon. The correspondent of the Reverberator had come back.

IX

Mr. Flack's relations with his old friends didn't indeed, after his
return, take on the familiarity and frequency of their intercourse
a year before: he was the first to refer to the marked change in the
situation. They had got into the high set and they didn't care about the
past: he alluded to the past as if it had been rich in mutual vows, in
pledges now repudiated.

"What's the matter all the same? Won't you come round there with us some
day?" Mr. Dosson asked; not having perceived for himself any reason why
the young journalist shouldn't be a welcome and easy presence in the
Cours la Reine.

Delia wanted to know what Mr. Flack was talking about: didn't he know
a lot of people that they didn't know and wasn't it natural they should
have their own society? The young man's treatment of the question was
humorous, and it was with Delia that the discussion mainly went forward.
When he maintained that the Dossons had shamelessly "shed" him Mr.
Dosson returned "Well, I guess you'll grow again!" And Francie made
the point that it was no use for him to pose as a martyr, since he knew
perfectly well that with all the celebrated people he saw and