The Reverberator by James, Henry, 1843-1916

"Really?" she asked with all her grave good faith in her face. "I thought I HAD to--for fear I should appear ungrateful."

"Ungrateful?"

"Why to you--after what you had done. Don't you remember that it was you who introduced us--?" And she paused with a fatigued delicacy.

"Not to those snobs who are screaming like frightened peacocks. I beg your pardon--I haven't THAT on my conscience!" Mr. Flack quite grandly declared.

"Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and he introduced us to--to his friends," she explained, colouring, as if it were a fault for the inexactness caused by her magnanimity. "That's why I thought I ought to tell you what you'd like."

"Why, do you suppose if I'd known where that first visit of ours to Waterlow was going to bring you out I'd have taken you within fifty miles--?" He stopped suddenly; then in another tone: "Jerusalem, there's no one like you! And you told them it was all YOU?"

"Never mind what I told them."

"Miss Francie," said George Flack, "if you'll marry me I'll never ask a question again. I'll go into some other business."

"Then you didn't do it on purpose?" Francie asked.

"On purpose?"

"To get me into a quarrel with them--so that I might be free again."

"Well, of all the blamed ideas--!" the young man gasped. "YOUR pure mind never gave birth to that--it was your sister's."

"Wasn't it natural it should occur to me, since if, as you say, you'd never consciously have been the means--"

"Ah but I WAS the means!" Mr. Flack interrupted. "We must go, after all, by what DID happen."

"Well, I thanked you when I drove with you and let you draw me out. So we're square, aren't we?" The term Francie used was a colloquialism generally associated with levity, but her face, as she spoke, was none the less deeply seriou--serious even to pain.

"We're square?" he repeated.

"I don't think you ought to ask for anything more. Good-bye."

"Good-bye? Never!" cried George Flack, who flushed with his defeat to a degree that spoke strangely of his hopes.

Something in the way she repeated her "Goodbye!" betrayed her impression of this, and not a little withal that so much confidence left her unflattered. "Do go away!" she broke out.

"Well, I'll come back very soon"--and he took up his hat.

"Please don't--I don't like it." She had now contrived to put a wide space between them.

"Oh you tormentress!" he groaned. He went toward the door, but before he reached it turned round.

"Will you tell me this anyway? ARE you going to marry the lot--after this?"

"Do you want to put that in the paper?"

"Of course I do--and say you said it!" Mr. Flack held up his head.

They stood looking at each other across the large room. "Well then--I ain't. There!"

"That's all right," he said as he went out.

XIV