I
can say. You must take me as I am," said Francie Dosson.

"Don't--don't; you infuriate me!" he pleaded, frowning.

She had seemed to soften, but she was in a sudden flame again. "Of
course I do, and I shall do it again. We're too terribly different.
Everything makes you so. You CAN'T give them up--ever, ever.
Good-bye--good-bye! That's all I wanted to tell you."

"I'll go and throttle him!" the young man almost howled.

"Very well, go! Good-bye." She had stepped quickly to the door and had
already opened it, vanishing as she had done the other time.

"Francie, Francie!" he supplicated, following her into the passage. The
door was not the one that led to the salon; it communicated with the
other apartments. The girl had plunged into these--he already heard her
push a sharp bolt. Presently he went away without taking leave of Mr.
Dosson and Delia.

"Why he acts just like Mr. Flack," said the old man when they discovered
that the interview in the dining-room had come to an end.

The next day was a bad one for Charles Waterlow, his work in the Avenue
de Villiers being terribly interrupted. Gaston Probert invited himself
to breakfast at noon and remained till the time at which the artist
usually went out--an extravagance partly justified by the previous
separation of several weeks. During these three or four hours Gaston
walked up and down the studio while Waterlow either sat or stood before
his easel. He put his host vastly out and acted on his nerves, but this
easy genius was patient with him by reason of much pity, feeling the
occasion indeed more of a crisis in the history of the troubled youth
than the settlement of one question would make it. Waterlow's compassion
was slightly tinged with contempt, for there was being settled above
all, it seemed to him, and, alas, in the wrong sense, the question of
his poor friend's character. Gaston was in a fever; he broke out into
passionate pleas--he relapsed into gloomy silences. He roamed about
continually, his hands in his pockets and his hair in a tangle; he could
take neither a decision nor a momentary rest. It struck his companion
more than ever before that he was after all essentially a foreigner;
he had the foreign sensibility, the sentimental candour, the need for
sympathy, the communicative despair. A true young Anglo-Saxon would have
buttoned himself up in his embarrassment and been dry and awkward and
capable, and, however conscious of a pressure, unconscious