haps to call personally, and not
simply through the medium of the visits paid by his daughters to their
wives, on Messieurs de Brecourt and de Cliche? Once when this subject
came up in George Flack's presence the old man said he would go round
if Mr. Flack would accompany him. "All right, we'll go right along!"
Mr. Flack had responded, and this inspiration had become a living fact
qualified only by the "mercy," to Delia Dosson, that the other two
gentlemen were not at home. "Suppose they SHOULD get in?" she had said
lugubriously to her sister.

"Well, what if they do?" Francie had asked.

"Why the count and the marquis won't be interested in Mr. Flack."

"Well then perhaps he'll be interested in them. He can write something
about them. They'll like that."

"Do you think they would?" Delia had solemnly weighed it.

"Why, yes, if he should say fine things."

"They do like fine things," Delia had conceded. "They get off so many
themselves. Only the way Mr. Flack does it's a different style."

"Well, people like to be praised in any style."

"That's so," Delia had continued to brood.

One afternoon, coming in about three o'clock, Mr. Flack found Francie
alone. She had expressed a wish after luncheon for a couple of hours
of independence: intending to write to Gaston, and having accidentally
missed a post, she had determined her letter should be of double its
usual length. Her companions had respected her claim for solitude, Mr.
Dosson taking himself off to his daily session in the reading-room of
the American bank and Delia--the girls had now at their command a
landau as massive as the coach of an ambassador--driving away to the
dressmaker's, a frequent errand, to superintend and urge forward the
progress of her sister's wedding-clothes. Francie was not skilled in
composition; she wrote slowly and had in thus addressing her lover much
the same sense of sore tension she supposed she should have in standing
at the altar with him. Her father and Delia had a theory that when she
shut herself up that way she poured forth pages that would testify to
her costly culture. When George Flack was ushered in at all events she
was still bent over her blotting-book at one of the gilded tables, and
there was an inkstain on her pointed forefinger. It was no disloyalty
to Gaston, but only at the most an echo as of the sweetness of "recess
time" in old school mornings that made her glad to see her visitor.

She hadn't quite known h