d at the same time
forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's bill
for Madame Ashburleigh's baby."

"Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid." And I
administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his fatherly joy
bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses, kept quiet in his
refulgent shoes and answered as well as he could.

[Illustration: "TO MY ARMS."]

Francine, he protested, had never been a flirt (I have met no
Frenchmen who were ignorant of that one English word, to which they
give a new value by pronouncing it in a very orotund manner, as
_flort_). When she came to be ten or twelve, Frau Kranich--until then
a well-preserved lioness with an appetite for society--ceased to give
her dolls and promised to give her an education. At the same time, the
banker's widow left Paris, and repaired with her charge to Brussels,
where the little girl received some good half-Jesuitical, half-English
schooling, of the kind suggested in the Bronte novels. Her diploma
attained, Francine begged to accompany her English teacher back to
London: she wished to become a _meess_, she said, and be competent to
teach like a new Hypatia. She had hardly bidden her kind protectress
adieu when Frau Kranich's nephew arrived at Brussels, exceedingly
dissatisfied with his American business in the bar-rooms of the grand
duke of Mississippi. A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet's claims
upon his aunt took possession of this prudent spirit. He took up a
watch-post at a university town on the Rhine. He began to whisper
vague exaggerations of her coquetries and liveliness, which the
Protestant circle that revolved about Madame Kranich did not fail to
bear in to her. This lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of
manners was the sign of a noble frankness. She wrote to Francine,
bidding her come immediately from London. The girl not replying, the
hopeful nephew was put upon her track. He went away. His letters from
England reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was
probably come back to Belgium, "I know not in what suburb of Brussels
our very independent miss may this instant be hiding," he wrote.

About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels,
a young _romantique_ named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and
lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the
churchyard at Laaken. It was a delicious mystery. Kind meddlers
approached the sexton, who said