The Reverberator Part 24

"Well, I don't know, after all--the Reverberator came for nothing," her father as gaily returned.

"Don't you be afraid he'll ever send it now!" she shouted in her return of confidence.

"I'm very sorry--because they were all lovely," Francie went on to Gaston with sad eyes.

"Let us wait to say that till they come back to us," he answered somewhat sententiously. He really cared little at this moment whether his relatives were lovely or not.

"I'm sure you won't have to wait long!" Delia remarked with the same cheerfulness.

"'Till they come back'?" Mr. Dosson repeated. "Ah they can't come back now, sir. We won't take them in!" The words fell from his lips with a fine unexpected austerity which imposed itself, producing a momentary silence, and it is a sign of Gaston's complete emanc.i.p.ation that he didn't in his heart resent this image of eventual favours denied his race. The resentment was rather Delia's, but she kept it to herself, for she was capable of reflecting with complacency that the key of the house would after all be hers, so that she could open the door for the Proberts if the Proberts should knock. Now that her sister's marriage was really to take place her consciousness that the American people would have been resoundingly told so was still more agreeable. The party left the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham on the morrow, but it appeared to the German waiter, as he accepted another five-franc piece from the happy and now reckless Gaston, that they were even yet not at all clear as to where they were going.