“Oh the most awful thing; a newspaper sent this morning from America to my father--containing two horrible columns of vulgar lies and scandal about our family, about all of us, about you, about your picture, about poor Marguerite, calling her ‘Margot,’ about Maxime and Leonie de Villepreux, saying he’s her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. Papa’s in the most awful state!” and Mme. de Brecourt panted to take breath. She had spoken with the volubility of horror and passion. “You’re outraged with us and you must suffer with us,” she went on. “But who has done it? Who has done it? Who has done it?” “Why Mr. Flack--Mr. Flack!” Francie quickly replied. She was appalled, overwhelmed; but her foremost feeling was the wish not to appear to disavow her knowledge. “Mr. Flack? do you mean that awful person--? He ought to be shot, he ought to be burnt alive. Maxime will kill him, Maxime’s in an unspeakable rage. Everything’s at end, we’ve been served up to the rabble, we shall have to leave Paris. How could he know such things?--and they all so infamously false!” The poor woman poured forth her woe in questions, contradictions, lamentations; she didn’t know what to ask first, against what to protest. “Do you mean that wretch Marguerite saw you with at Mr. Waterlow’s? Oh Francie, what has happened? She had a feeling then, a dreadful foreboding. She saw you afterwards--walking with him--in the Bois.” “Well, I didn’t see her,” the girl said. “You were talking with him--you were too absorbed: that’s what Margot remembers. Oh Francie, Francie!” wailed Mme. de Brecourt, whose distress was pitiful. “She tried to interfere at the studio, but I wouldn’t let her. He’s an old friend--a friend of poppa’s--and I like him very much. What my father allows, that’s not for others to criticise!” Francie continued. She was frightened, extremely frightened, at her companion’s air of tragedy and at the dreadful consequences she alluded to, consequences of an act she herself didn’t know, couldn’t comprehend nor measure yet. But there was an instinct of bravery in her which threw her into blind defence, defence even of George Flack, though it was a part of her consternation that on her too he should have practised a surprise--it would appear to be some self-seeking deception. “Oh how can you bear with such brutes, how can your father--? What devil has he paid to tattle to him?” “You scare me awfully--you terrify me,” the girl could but plead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen it, I don’t understand it. Of course I’ve talked to Mr. Flack.”