Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/135

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as well as my father's." Strange as it appeared, Francie could resign herself to this separation from her lover—it would last six or seven weeks—rather than accept the hospitality of his sisters. Mr. Dosson trusted him; he said to him, "Well, sir, you've got a big brain," at the end of a morning they spent with papers and pencils; upon which Gaston made his preparations to sail. Before he left Paris Francie, to do her justice, confided to him that her objection to going in such an intimate way even to Mme. de Brécourt's had been founded on a fear that in close quarters she would do something that would make them all despise her. Gaston replied, in the first place, that this was gammon and in the second he wanted to know if she expected never to be in close quarters with her new kinsfolk. "Ah, yes, but then it will be safer—we shall be married!" she returned. This little incident occurred three days before the young man started; but what happened just the evening previous was that, stopping for a last word at the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham on his way to take the night express to London (he was to sail from Liverpool), he found Mr. George Flack sitting in the red satin saloon. The correspondent of the Reverberator had come back.