"Yes, perfectly, if you can persuade me not to stick to you. But in that
case what good will their forgiveness do you?"

"Well, perhaps it's better to pay for it," the girl went on.

"To pay for it?"

"By suffering something. For it WAS dreadful," she solemnly gloomily
said.

"Oh for all you'll suffer--!" Gaston protested, shining down on her.

"It was for you--only for you, as I told you," Francie returned.

"Yes, don't tell me again--I don't like that explanation! I ought to let
you know that my father now declines to do anything for me," the young
man added to Mr. Dosson.

"To do anything for you?"

"To make me any allowance."

"Well, that makes me feel better. We don't want your father's money, you
know," this more soothable parent said with his mild sturdiness.

"There'll be enough for all; especially if we economise in
newspapers"--Delia carried it elegantly off.

"Well, I don't know, after all--the Reverberator came for nothing," her
father as gaily returned.

"Don't you be afraid he'll ever send it now!" she shouted in her return
of confidence.

"I'm very sorry--because they were all lovely," Francie went on to
Gaston with sad eyes.

"Let us wait to say that till they come back to us," he answered
somewhat sententiously. He really cared little at this moment whether
his relatives were lovely or not.

"I'm sure you won't have to wait long!" Delia remarked with the same
cheerfulness.

"'Till they come back'?" Mr. Dosson repeated. "Ah they can't come back
now, sir. We won't take them in!" The words fell from his lips with a
fine unexpected austerity which imposed itself, producing a momentary
silence, and it is a sign of Gaston's complete emancipation that he
didn't in his heart resent this image of eventual favours denied his
race. The resentment was rather Delia's, but she kept it to herself, for
she was capable of reflecting with complacency that the key of the
house would after all be hers, so that she could open the door for the
Proberts if the Proberts should knock. Now that her sister's marriage
was really to take place her consciousness that the American people
would have been resoundingly told so was still more agreeable. The
party left the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham on the morrow, but it
appeared to the German waiter, as he accepted another five-franc piece
from the happy and now reckless Gaston, that they were even yet not at
all clear as to where they were going.