ll be sure to do something."

"Do something--?"

"Well, that will break the charm," Francie sighed with the sweetest
feeblest fatalism.

"If you say that again I shall think you do it on purpose!" Delia
declared. "ARE you thinking of George Flack?" she repeated in a moment.

"Oh do leave him alone!" Francie answered in one of her rare
irritations.

"Then why are you so queer?"

"Oh I'm tired!"--and the girl turned impatiently away. And this was the
simple truth; she was tired of the consideration her sister saw fit to
devote to the question of Gaston's not having, since their return to
Paris, brought the old folks, as they used to say at home, to see them.
She was overdone with Delia's theories on this subject, which varied,
from the view that he was keeping his intercourse with his American
friends unguessed by them because they were uncompromising in their
grandeur, to the presumption that that grandeur would descend some day
upon the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham and carry Francie away in a
blaze of glory. Sometimes Delia played in her earnest way with the idea
that they ought to make certain of Gaston's omissions the ground of a
challenge; at other times she gave her reasons for judging that they
ought to take no notice of them. Francie, in this connexion, had neither
doctrine nor instinct of her own; and now she was all at once happy and
uneasy, all at once in love and in doubt and in fear and in a state
of native indifference. Her lover had dwelt to her but little on his
domestic circle, and she had noticed this circumstance the more because
of a remark dropped by Charles Waterlow to the effect that he and
his father were great friends: the word seemed to her odd in that
application. She knew he saw that gentleman and the types of high
fashion, as she supposed, Mr. Probert's daughters, very often, and she
therefore took for granted that they knew he saw her. But the most he
had done was to say they would come and see her like a shot if once
they should believe they could trust her. She had wanted to know what he
meant by their trusting her, and he had explained that it would seem
to them too good to be true--that she should be kind to HIM: something
exactly of that sort was what they dreamed of for him. But they had
dreamed before and been disappointed and were now on their guard. From
the moment they should feel they were on solid ground they would join
hands and dance round her. Francie's answer to