[Illustration: FRAU KRANICH.]

"I am sure I talk as plain as a professor. Look! You frightened me at
first with your doubts and your impossibilities. You have only to make
Kranich's aunt agree with Francine's guardian, and at the same time
forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's bill
for Madame Ashburleigh's baby."

"Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid." And I
administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his fatherly joy
bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses, kept quiet in his
refulgent shoes and answered as well as he could.

[Illustration: "TO MY ARMS."]

Francine, he protested, had never been a flirt (I have met no
Frenchmen who were ignorant of that one English word, to which they
give a new value by pronouncing it in a very orotund manner, as
_flort_). When she came to be ten or twelve, Frau Kranich--until then
a well-preserved lioness with an appetite for society--ceased to give
her dolls and promised to give her an education. At the same time, the
banker's widow left Paris, and repaired with her charge to Brussels,
where the little girl received some good half-Jesuitical, half-English
schooling, of the kind suggested in the Brontë novels. Her diploma
attained, Francine begged to accompany her English teacher back to
London: she wished to become a _meess_, she said, and be competent to
teach like a new Hypatia. She had hardly bidden her kind protectress
adieu when Frau Kranich's nephew arrived at Brussels, exceedingly
dissatisfied with his American business in the bar-rooms of the grand
duke of Mississippi. A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet's claims