Chapter 14

When Gaston Probert came that evening he was received by Dosson and
Delia, and when he asked where Francie might be was told by the latter
that she would show herself in half an hour. Francie had instructed her
sister that as their friend would have, first of all, information to
give their father about the business he had transacted in America he
wouldn't care for a lot of women in the room. When Delia reported this
speech to Mr. Dosson that gentleman protested that he wasn't in any
hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether Mr.
Probert had a good time--whether he had liked it over there. Gaston
might have liked it, but he didn't look as if he had had a very good
time. His face told of reverses, of suffering; and Delia declared to him
that if she hadn't received his assurance to the contrary she would have
believed he was right down sick. He allowed that he had been very sick
at sea and was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that there
was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr.
Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over
their relations. The girl had schooled her father to a waiting attitude
on this point, and the manner in which she had descended on him in the
morning, after Mr. Flack had come upstairs, was a lesson he wasn't
likely soon to forget. It had been impressed on him that she was indeed
wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he
mustn't speak of the "piece in the paper" unless young Probert should
speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began
by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending
Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why the way they
felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why he had
simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.

"Well, hanged if I understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you
liked the piece--you think it's so queer THEY don't like it." "They," in
the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts
in congress assembled.

"I don't think anything's queer but you!" Delia had retorted; and she
had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of
"handling" Mr. Flack.

"Is that so?" the old gentleman had quavered in an impotence that made
him wince with a sense of meanness--meanness to his bold initiator of so
many Parisian hours.

Francie's visitor came down a few minutes later and passed through the
court and out of the hotel without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been
going to call after him, but Delia checked him with a violent pinch. The