Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/94

84 that it was a little American whom her brother had dug up. "And what do you propose to do with her, may one ask?" Mme. d'Outreville demanded, looking at Gaston Probert with an eye which seemed to read his secret, so that for half a minute he was on the point of breaking out: "I propose to marry her—there!" But he contained himself, only mentioning for the present that he aspired to ascertain to what uses she was adapted; meanwhile, he added, he expected to look at her a good deal, in the measure in which she would allow him. "Ah, that may take you far!" the old lady exclaimed, as she got up to go; and Gaston glanced at his sister, to see if this idea struck her too. But she appeared almost provokingly exempt from alarm: if she had been suspicious it would have been easier to make his confession. When he came back from accompanying Mme. d'Outreville to her carriage he asked her if the girl at the studio had known who she was and if she had been frightened. Mme. de Brecourt stared; she evidently thought that kind of sensibility implied an initiation which a little American, accidentally encountered, could not possibly have. "Why should she be frightened? She wouldn't be even if she had known who I was; much less therefore when I was nothing for her."

"Oh, you were not nothing for her!" Gaston declared; and when his sister rejoined that he