f you'll marry me I'll never ask a
question again. I'll go into some other business."

"Then you didn't do it on purpose?" Francie asked.

"On purpose?"

"To get me into a quarrel with them--so that I might be free again."

"Well, of all the blamed ideas--!" the young man gasped. "YOUR pure mind
never gave birth to that--it was your sister's."

"Wasn't it natural it should occur to me, since if, as you say, you'd
never consciously have been the means--"

"Ah but I WAS the means!" Mr. Flack interrupted. "We must go, after all,
by what DID happen."

"Well, I thanked you when I drove with you and let you draw me out.
So we're square, aren't we?" The term Francie used was a colloquialism
generally associated with levity, but her face, as she spoke, was none
the less deeply serious--serious even to pain.

"We're square?" he repeated.

"I don't think you ought to ask for anything more. Good-bye."

"Good-bye? Never!" cried George Flack, who flushed with his defeat to a
degree that spoke strangely of his hopes.

Something in the way she repeated her "Goodbye!" betrayed her impression
of this, and not a little withal that so much confidence left her
unflattered. "Do go away!" she broke out.

"Well, I'll come back very soon"--and he took up his hat.

"Please don't--I don't like it." She had now contrived to put a wide
space between them.

"Oh you tormentress!" he groaned. He went toward the door, but before he
reached it turned round.

"Will you tell me this anyway? ARE you going to marry the lot--after
this?"

"Do you want to put that in the paper?"

"Of course I do--and say you said it!" Mr. Flack held up his head.

They stood looking at each other across the large room. "Well then--I
ain't. There!"

"That's all right," he said as he went out.

XIV

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 d