Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/108

98 his American friends hidden from them because they were uncompromising, in their grandeur, to the doctrine that that grandeur would descend some day upon the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham and carry Francie away in a blaze of glory. Sometimes Delia put forth the view that they ought to make certain of Gaston's omissions the ground of a challenge; at other times she opined that they ought to take no notice of them. Francie, in this connection, had no theories, no impulses of her own; and now she was all at once happy and freshly glad and in love and sceptical and frightened and indifferent. Her lover had talked to her but little about his kinsfolk, and she had noticed this circumstance the more because of a remark dropped by Charles Waterlow to the effect that he and his father were great friends: the word seemed to her odd in that application. She knew Gaston saw that gentleman, and the exalted ladies Mr. Probert's daughters, very often, and she therefore took for granted that they knew he saw her. But the most he had done was to say they would come and see her like a shot if once they should believe they could trust her. She had wished to know what he meant by their trusting her, and he had explained that it would appear to them too good to be true—that she should be kind to him: something exactly of that sort was what they dreamed of for him. But they had dreamed before and been disappointed, and now they were on their guard.