ur, the
putting before her of a hundred francs' worth of food and drink, which
they'll scarcely touch--all that's the dear man's own romance; the
expensive kind, expensive in francs and centimes, in which he abounds.
And the circus afterwards--which is cheaper, but which he'll find some
means of making as dear as possible--that's also HIS tribute to the
ideal. It does for him. He'll see her through. They won't talk of
anything worse than you and me."

"Well, we're bad enough perhaps, thank heaven," she laughed, "to upset
them! Mr. Waymarsh at any rate is a hideous old coquette." And the
next moment she had dropped everything for a different pursuit. "What
you don't appear to know is that Jeanne de Vionnet has become engaged.
She's to marry--it has been definitely arranged--young Monsieur de
Montbron."

He fairly blushed. "Then--if you know it--it's 'out'?"

"Don't I often know things that are NOT out? However," she said, "this
will be out to-morrow. But I see I've counted too much on your
possible ignorance. You've been before me, and I don't make you jump
as I hoped."

He gave a gasp at her insight. "You never fail! I've HAD my jump. I
had it when I first heard."

"Then if you knew why didn't you tell me as soon as you came in?"

"Because I had it from her as a thing not yet to be spoken of."

Miss Gostrey wondered. "From Madame de Vionnet herself?"

"As a probability--not quite a certainty: a good cause in which Chad
has been working. So I've waited."

"You need wait no longer," she returned. "It reached me
yesterday--roundabout and accidental, but by a person who had had it
from one of the young man's own people--as a thing quite settled. I
was only keeping it for you."

"You thought Chad wouldn't have told me?"

She hesitated. "Well, if he hasn't--"

"He hasn't. And yet the thing appears to have been practically his
doing. So there we are."

"There we are!" Maria candidly echoed.

"That's why I jumped. I jumped," he continued to explain, "because it
means, this disposition of the daughter, that there's now nothing else:
nothing else but him and the mother."

"Still--it simplifies."

"It simplifies"--he fully concurred. "But that's precisely where we
are. It marks a stage in his relation. The act is his answer to Mrs.
Newsome's demonstration."

"It tells," Maria asked, "the worst?"

"The worst."

"But is the worst what he wants Sarah to know?"

"He doesn't care for S