threw down his implements and added: "And come out
of this--into the air."

Gaston, however, was planted in his path on the way to the door. "And if
she goes again and does the very same?"

"The very same--?" Waterlow thought.

"I mean something else as barbarous and as hard to bear."

"Well," said Waterlow, "you'll at least have got rid of your family."

"Yes, if she lets me in again I shall be glad they're not there! They're
right, pourtant, they're right," Gaston went on, passing out of the
studio with his friend.

"They're right?"

"It was unimaginable that she should."

"Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence--providence taking
you off your guard to give you your chance." This was ingenious, but,
though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie's lover--if
lover he may in his so infirm aspect be called--looked as if he
mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him
however was his companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they
had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out:
"Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you see that
she's really of the softest finest material that breathes, that she's
a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an
apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a
rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you
yourself have the wit to conceive?"

"Ah my dear friend!"--and poor Gaston, with another of his revulsions,
panted for gratitude.

"The limit will be yours, not hers," Waterlow added.

"No, no, I've done with limits," his friend ecstatically cried.

That evening at ten o'clock Gaston presented himself at the Hotel de
l'Univers et de Cheltenham and requested the German waiter to introduce
him into the dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson's apartments and then go
and tell Miss Francina he awaited her there.

"Oh you'll be better there than in the zalon--they've villed it with
their luccatch," said the man, who always addressed him in an intention
of English and wasn't ignorant of the tie that united the visitor to
the amiable American family, or perhaps even of the modifications it had
lately undergone.

"With their luggage?"

"They leave to-morrow morning--ach I don't think they themselves know
for where, sir."

"Please then say to Miss Francina that I've called on the most urgent
business and am extraordinarily pre