ing day she felt that she did wish to see Gaston about it. Her desire was to wait, counting the hours, so that she might just explain, saying two or three things. Perhaps these things would not make it better—very likely they would not; but at any rate nothing would have been done in the interval, at least on her part and her father's and Delia's, to make it worse. She told her father that she should not like him to go round, and she was in some degree relieved at perceiving that he did not seem very clear as to what it was open to him to say to the Proberts. He was not afraid but he was vague. His relation to almost everything that had happened to them as a family for a good while back was a sense of the absence of precedents, and precedents were particularly absent now, for he had never before seen a lot of people in a rage about a piece in the paper. Delia also reassured her; she said she would see to it that their father didn't dash off. She communicated to her indeed that he had not the smallest doubt that Gaston, in a few days, would blow them all up much higher than they had blown her and that he was very sorry he had let her go round on that sort of summons to Mme. de Brécourt's. It was for her and the rest to come to Francie and to him, and if they had anything practical to say they would arrive in a body yet. If Mr. Dosson had the sense of his daughter's having been roughly handled he derived
