utumn and only wanted
a reason to come back about the twentieth of September. Mr. Waterlow
remarked humorously that she evidently bossed the shop. Meanwhile,
before starting for Spain, he would see her as often as possible--his
eye would take possession of her.

His companion envied his eye, even expressed jealousy of his eye. It was
perhaps as a step towards establishing his right to jealousy that Mr.
Probert left a card upon the Miss Dossons at the Hotel de l'Univers et
de Cheltenham, having first ascertained that such a proceeding would
not, by the young American sisters, be regarded as an unwarrantable
liberty. Gaston Probert was an American who had never been in America
and was obliged to take counsel on such an emergency as that. He knew
that in Paris young men didn't call at hotels on blameless maids, but
he also knew that blameless maids, unattended by a parent, didn't visit
young men in studios; and he had no guide, no light he could trust--none
save the wisdom of his friend Waterlow, which was for the most part
communicated to him in a derisive and misleading form. Waterlow, who
was after all himself an ornament of the French, and the very French,
school, jeered at the other's want of native instinct, at the way he
never knew by which end to take hold of a compatriot. Poor Probert was
obliged to confess to his terrible paucity of practice, and that in
the great medley of aliens and brothers--and even more of sisters--he
couldn't tell which was which. He would have had a country and
countrymen, to say nothing of countrywomen, if he could; but that matter
had never been properly settled for him, and it's one there's ever a
great difficulty in a gentleman's settling for himself. Born in Paris,
he had been brought up altogether on French lines, in a family that
French society had irrecoverably absorbed. His father, a Carolinian
and a Catholic, was a Gallomaniac of the old American type. His three
sisters had married Frenchmen, and one of them lived in Brittany while
the others were ostensibly seated in Touraine. His only brother had
fallen, during the Terrible Year, in defence of their adopted country.
Yet Gaston, though he had had an old Legitimist marquis for godfather,
was not legally one of its children; his mother had, on her death-bed,
extorted from him the promise that he wouldn't take service in its
armies; she considered, after the death of her elder son--Gaston, in
1870, had been a boy of ten--that the f