et himself go. "Why won't you understand
it--why won't you understand the rest? Don't you see how it has worked
round--the heartless brutes they've turned into, and the way OUR life,
yours and mine, is bound to be the same? Don't you see the damned
sneaking scorn with which they treat you and that _I_ only want to do
anything in the world for you?"

Francie's white face, very quiet now, let all this pass without a sign
of satisfaction. Her only response was presently to say: "Why did you
ask me so many questions that day?"

"Because I always ask questions--it's my nature and my business to ask
them. Haven't you always seen me ask you and ask every one all I could?
Don't you know they're the very foundation of my work? I thought you
sympathised with my work so much--you used to tell me you did."

"Well, I did," she allowed.

"You put it in the dead past, I see. You don't then any more?"

If this remark was on her visitor's part the sign of a rare assurance
the girl's cold mildness was still unruffled by it. She considered, she
even smiled; then she replied: "Oh yes I do--only not so much."

"They HAVE worked on you; but I should have thought they'd have
disgusted you. I don't care--even a little sympathy will do: whatever
you've got left." He paused, looking at her, but it was a speech she had
nothing for; so he went on: "There was no obligation for you to answer
my questions--you might have shut me up that day with a word."

"Really?" she asked with all her grave good faith in her face. "I
thought I HAD to--for fear I should appear ungrateful."

"Ungrateful?"

"Why to you--after what you had done. Don't you remember that it was you
who introduced us--?" And she paused with a fatigued delicacy.

"Not to those snobs who are screaming like frightened peacocks. I beg
your pardon--I haven't THAT on my conscience!" Mr. Flack quite grandly
declared.

"Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and he introduced us to--to
his friends," she explained, colouring, as if it were a fault for the
inexactness caused by her magnanimity. "That's why I thought I ought to
tell you what you'd like."

"Why, do you suppose if I'd known where that first visit of ours to
Waterlow was going to bring you out I'd have taken you within fifty
miles--?" He stopped suddenly; then in another tone: "Jerusalem, there's
no one like you! And you told them it was all YOU?"

"Never mind what I told them."

"Miss Francie," said George Flack, "i