hed 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--whe