Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/218

208 there was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr. Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over their relations. The girl had schooled her father to reticence on this point, and the manner in which she had descended upon him in the morning, after Mr. Flack had come up stairs, was a lesson he was not likely soon to forget. It had been impressed upon him that she was indeed wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he must not speak of the "piece in the paper" unless young Probert should speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why, the way they felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why, he had simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.

"Well, hanged if I understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you liked the piece—you think it's so queer they don't like it." "They," in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts in congress assembled.

"I don't think anything is queer but you!" Delia had retorted; and she had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of "handling" Mr. Flack.