[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 Bronte 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 upon his aunt took possession of this prudent spirit.  He took up a watch-post at a university town on the Rhine.  He began to whisper vague exaggerations of her coquetries and liveliness, which the Protestant circle that revolved about Madame Kranich did not fail to bear in to her.  This lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of manners was the sign of a noble frankness.  She wrote to Francine, bidding her come immediately from London.  The girl not replying, the hopeful nephew was put upon her track.  He went away.  His letters from England reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was probably come back to Belgium, “I know not in what suburb of Brussels our very independent miss may this instant be hiding,” he wrote.

About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels, a young romantique named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the churchyard at Laaken.  It was a delicious mystery.  Kind meddlers approached the sexton, who said that all he knew of the babe’s mother was that she was a beautiful lady from London.  Kranich carried the story dutifully to his aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise:  “Can Francine have become sufficiently