Gaston kept echoing. “In self-preservation?” “To save from destruction the last scrap of your independence. That’s a much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They’re doing their best to kill you morally--to render you incapable of individual life.” Gaston was immensely struck. “They are--they are!” he declared with enthusiasm. “Well then, if you believe it, for heaven’s sake go and marry her to-morrow!” Waterlow threw down his implements and added: “And come out of this--into the air.” Gaston, however, was planted in his path on the way to the door. “And if she goes again and does the very same?” “The very same--?” Waterlow thought. “I mean something else as barbarous and as hard to bear.” “Well,” said Waterlow, “you’ll at least have got rid of your family.” “Yes, if she lets me in again I shall be glad they’re not there! They’re right, pourtant, they’re right,” Gaston went on, passing out of the studio with his friend. “They’re right?” “It was unimaginable that she should.” “Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence--providence taking you off your guard to give you your chance.” This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie’s lover--if lover he may in his so infirm aspect be called--looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion’s saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: “Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don’t you see that she’s really of the softest finest material that breathes, that she’s a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the wit to conceive?” “Ah my dear friend!”--and poor Gaston, with another of his revulsions, panted for gratitude. “The limit will be yours, not hers,” Waterlow added. “No, no, I’ve done with limits,” his friend ecstatically cried. That evening at ten o’clock Gaston presented himself at the Hotel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham and requested the German waiter to introduce him into the dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson’s apartments and then go and tell Miss Francina he awaited her there. “Oh you’ll be better there than in the zalon--they’ve villed it with their luccatch,” said the man, who always addressed him in an intention of English and wasn’t ignorant of the tie that united the visitor to the amiable American family, or perhaps even of the modifications it had lately undergone. “With their luggage?” “They leave to-morrow morning--ach I don’t think they themselves know for where, sir.” “Please then say to Miss Francina that I’ve called on the most urgent business and am extraordinarily pressed.”