“I don’t care where. Anywhere to get away.” “Before Gaston comes--without seeing him?” “I don’t want to see him. When they were all ranting and raving at me just now I wished he was there--I told them so. But now I don’t feel like that--I can never see him again.” “I don’t suppose YOU’RE crazy, are you?” Delia returned. “I can’t tell him it wasn’t me--I can’t, I can’t!” her companion went on. Delia planted herself in front of her. “Francie Dosson, if you’re going to tell him you’ve done anything wrong you might as well stop before you begin. Didn’t you hear how poppa put it?” “I’m sure I don’t know,” Francie said listlessly. “‘Don’t give up an old friend--there’s nothing on earth so mean.’ Now isn’t Gaston Probert an old friend?” “It will be very simple--he’ll give me up.” “Then he’ll be worse than a worm.” “Not in the least--he’ll give me up as he took me. He’d never have asked me to marry him if he hadn’t been able to get THEM to accept me: he thinks everything in life of THEM. If they cast me off now he’ll do just the same. He’ll have to choose between us, and when it comes to that he’ll never choose me.” “He’ll never choose Mr. Flack, if that’s what you mean--if you’re going to identify yourself so with HIM!” “Oh I wish he’d never been born!” Francie wailed; after which she suddenly shivered. And then she added that she was sick--she was going to bed, and her sister took her off to her room. Mr. Dosson that afternoon, sitting by his younger daughter’s bedside, read the dreadful “piece” out to both his children from the copy of the Reverberator he had secured on the boulevard. It is a remarkable fact that as a family they were rather disappointed in this composition, in which their curiosity found less to repay it than it had expected, their resentment against Mr. Flack less to stimulate it, their fluttering effort to take the point of view of the Proberts less to sustain it, and their acceptance of the promulgation of Francie’s innocent remarks as a natural incident of the life of the day less to make them reconsider it. The letter from Paris appeared lively, “chatty,” highly calculated to please, and so far as the personalities contained in it were concerned Mr. Dosson wanted to know if they weren’t aware over here of the charges brought every day against the most prominent men in Boston. “If there was anything in that style they might talk,” he said; and he scanned the effusion afresh with a certain surprise at not finding in it some imputation of pecuniary malversation. The effect of an acquaintance with the text was to depress Delia, who didn’t exactly see what there was in it to take back or explain away. However, she was aware there were some points they didn’t understand, and doubtless these were the scandalous places--the things that had so worked up the Proberts. But why should they have minded if other people didn’t understand the allusions (these