Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/57

Rh to be on the field again the next winter and take it up seriously, this question of getting Francie in.

When Mr. Flack said to her that young Probert's set couldn't be either the rose or anything near it, since the oldest inhabitant had never heard of them, Delia had a flash of inspiration, an intellectual flight that she herself did not measure at the time. She asked if that did not perhaps prove on the contrary quite the opposite—that they were just the cream and beyond all others. Was there not a kind of inner circle, and were they not somewhere about the centre of that? George Flack almost quivered at this pregnant suggestion from so unusual a quarter, for he guessed on the spot that Delia Dosson had divined. "Why, do you mean one of those families that have worked down so far you can't find where they went in?" that was the phrase in which he recognised the truth of the girl's idea. Delia's fixed eyes assented, and after a moment of cogitation George Flack broke out—"That's the kind of family we want a sketch of!"

"Well, perhaps they don't want to be sketched. You had better find out," Delia had rejoined.

The chance to find out might have seemed to present itself when Mr. Probert walked in that confiding way into the hotel; for his arrival was followed, a quarter of an hour later, by that of the representative of the Reverberator. Gaston