strange lovely girl, whom he liked so much
and whose companions he didn't like, that he felt supremely without a
vocation. Freshness was in HER at least, if he had only been organised
for catching it. He prayed earnestly, in relation to such a triumph,
for a providential re-enforcement of Waterlow's sense of that source
of charm. If Waterlow had a fault it was that his freshnesses were
sometimes too crude.

He avenged himself for the artist's profanation of his first attempt
to approach Miss Francie by indulging at the end of another week in
a second. He went about six o'clock, when he supposed she would have
returned from her day's wanderings, and his prudence was rewarded by
the sight of the young lady sitting in the court of the hotel with her
father and sister. Mr. Dosson was new to Gaston Probert, but the young
man might have been a naturalist visiting a rank country with a net of
such narrow meshes as to let no creature of the air escape. The little
party was as usual expecting Mr. Flack at any moment, and they had
collected downstairs, so that he might pick them up easily. They had, on
the first floor, an expensive parlour, decorated in white and gold, with
sofas of crimson damask; but there was something lonely in that grandeur
and the place had become mainly a receptacle for their tall trunks, with
a half-emptied paper of chocolates or marrons glaces on every table.
After young Probert's first call his name was often on the lips of the
simple trio, and Mr. Dosson grew still more jocose, making nothing of a
secret of his perception that Francie hit the bull's-eye "every time."
Mr. Waterlow had returned their visit, but that was rather a matter
of course, since it was they who had gone after him. They had not gone
after the other one; it was he who had come after them. When he entered
the hotel, as they sat there, this pursuit and its probable motive
became startlingly vivid.

Delia had taken the matter much more seriously than her father; she
said there was ever so much she wanted to find out. She mused upon
these mysteries visibly, but with no great advance, and she appealed
for assistance to George Flack, with a candour which he appreciated and
returned. If he really knew anything he ought to know at least who Mr.
Probert was; and she spoke as if it would be in the natural course that
as soon as he should find out he would put it for them somehow into his
paper. Mr. Flack promised to "nose round"; he said th