ow to finish her letter, in the infinite of the
bright propriety of her having written it, but Mr. Flack seemed to set a
practical human limit.

"I wouldn't have ventured," he observed on entering, "to propose this,
but I guess I can do with it now it's come."

"What can you do with?" she asked, wiping her pen.

"Well this happy chance. Just you and me together."

"I don't know what it's a chance for."

"Well, for me to be a little less miserable for a quarter of an hour. It
makes me so to see you look so happy."

"It makes you miserable?"--Francie took it gaily but guardedly.

"You ought to understand--when I say something so noble." And settling
himself on the sofa Mr. Flack continued: "Well, how do you get on
without Mr. Probert?"

"Very well indeed, thank you." The tone in which the girl spoke was
not an encouragement to free pleasantry, so that if he continued his
enquiries it was with as much circumspection as he had perhaps ever in
his life recognised himself as having to apply to a given occasion. He
was eminently capable of the sense that it wasn't in his interest to
strike her as indiscreet and profane; he only wanted still to appear
a real reliable "gentleman friend." At the same time he was not
indifferent to the profit for him of her noticing in him a sense as of
a good fellow once badly "sold," which would always give him a certain
pull on what he called to himself her lovely character. "Well, you're in
the real 'grand' old monde now, I suppose," he resumed at last, not
with an air of undue derision--rather with a kind of contemporary but
detached wistfulness.

"Oh I'm not in anything; I'm just where I've always been."

"I'm sorry; I hoped you'd tell me a good lot about it," said Mr. Flack,
not with levity.

"You think too much of that. What do you want to know so much about it
for?"

Well, he took some trouble for his reason. "Dear Miss Francie, a poor
devil of a journalist who has to get his living by studying-up things
has to think TOO much, sometimes, in order to think, or at any rate to
do, enough. We find out what we can--AS we can, you see."

She did seem to catch in it the note of pathos. "What do you want to
study-up?"

"Everything! I take in everything. It all depends on my opportunity. I
try and learn--I try and improve. Every one has something to tell--or to
sell; and I listen and watch--well, for what I can drink in or can
buy. I hoped YOU'D have something to tell--for I'm no