"After helping you to fish her out of an Italian lake, I will allow the circumstances were romantic." "I thought she--" "Of course, love at first sight. Just the thing to fetch you." "I thought she liked me as a girl at home might have liked me, who hadn't heard that my grandfather--" He thumped out an oath as he thrust his hands deep down in his yachtman's jacket. De Poincy smiled. "She's so young," Gano went on--"probably less sophisticated, I thought, than our American girls." "To be sure, a ravishing _ingénue_." "And here she was, ready to throw over poor Parthenay like that"--he tossed his cigarette overboard--"caring for him all the time, as Parthenay showed me. Then this _ingénue_, after turning the Tallmadge dollars into francs in her pretty baby head, was calmly arranging to help me to spend them here in France. How the devil they knew on such short acquaintance--before the settlement question came up--" "Oh, her brother asked me that first day." "What?" De Poincy nodded. "And when I thought they didn't so much as know that I was American!" He laughed with that excessive bitterness of youth perturbed, and pretended to speak apologetically. "You see, I've plumed myself on my French since I was seven, and my name tells nothing." "Your French is all right, but you don't imagine people like that would put themselves out for the _premier venu_ as they did for you from the start." Gano shrugged. "My mistake was that, even without my banker's reference, I didn't look upon myself as the _premier venu_." "I must say I admired the charming way they conveyed the idea to you that Mademoiselle Lucie--" "Shut up." "My dear fellow, you would never have dreamed of Mademoiselle Lucie, enchanting as she is, if it hadn't been for their tact in pointing out that--" "And you looked on!" "To be sure, and envied you your damned good luck. She's an adorable creature, and would spend your money with distinction." "Thanks. I needn't have come so far to find a woman who could manage that." "I'm in the enemy's camp," De Poincy went on. "I want you to settle in France." "And I--I want--" Gano looked out over the dancing waves, face to face on a sudden with something so new and unexpected as to be almost incredible. "What do you want?" asked De Poincy. "I want to go back to America by the first boat." "You're joking." "I'm in dead earnest. It sounds sudden, but it isn't. Something's been the matter with me for a deuce of a long time. I haven't known what it was. I do now. I'm homesick." "Doesn't it strike you you've postponed it a bit?"