“Oh I keep forgetting that I ever broke out to you that way. Everything’s so changed.” “Are you the proprietor of the paper now?” the girl went on, determined not to catch this sentimental echo. “What do you care? It wouldn’t even be delicate in me to tell you; for I DO remember the way you said you’d try and get your father to help me. Don’t say you’ve forgotten it, because you almost made me cry. Anyway, that isn’t the sort of help I want now and it wasn’t the sort of help I meant to ask you for then. I want sympathy and interest; I want some one to say to me once in a while ‘Keep up your old heart, Mr. Flack; you’ll come out all right.’ You see I’m a working-man and I don’t pretend to be anything else,” Francie’s companion went on. “I don’t live on the accumulations of my ancestors. What I have I earn--what I am I’ve fought for: I’m a real old travailleur, as they say here. I rejoice in it, but there’s one dark spot in it all the same.” “And what’s that?” Francie decided not quite at once to ask. “That it makes you ashamed of me.” “Oh how can you say?” And she got up as if a sense of oppression, of vague discomfort, had come over her. Her visitor troubled such peace as she had lately arrived at. “You wouldn’t be ashamed to go round with me?” “Round where?” “Well, anywhere: just to have one more walk. The very last.” George Flack had got up too and stood there looking at her with his bright eyes, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. As she hesitated he continued: “Then I’m not such a friend after all.” She rested her eyes a moment on the carpet; then raising them: “Where would you like to go?” “You could render me a service--a real service--without any inconvenience probably to yourself. Isn’t your portrait finished?” “Yes, but he won’t give it up.” “Who won’t give it up?” “Why Mr. Waterlow. He wants to keep it near him to look at it in case he should take a fancy to change it. But I hope he won’t change it--it’s so lovely as it is!” Francie made a mild joke of saying. “I hear it’s magnificent and I want to see it,” said George Flack. “Then why don’t you go?” “I’ll go if you’ll take me; that’s the service you can render me.” “Why I thought you went everywhere--into the palaces of kings!” Francie cried. “I go where I’m welcome, not where I ain’t. I don’t want to push into that studio alone; he doesn’t want me round. Oh you needn’t protest,” the young man went on; “if a fellow’s made sensitive he has got to stay so. I feel those things in the shade of a tone of voice. He doesn’t like newspaper-men. Some people don’t, you know. I ought to tell you that frankly.” Francie considered again, but looking this time at her visitor. “Why if it hadn’t been for you “--I’m afraid she said “hadn’t have been”--“I’d never have sat to him.” Mr. Flack smiled at her in silence for a little. “If it hadn’t been for me I think you’d never have met your future husband.”