Her companion again looked at her in silence. "I thought you had gone to her for several months." She felt sick; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. "Do you mean that great house is lost?"!

"The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up." "I doubt if they'd bear it again!"

"Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I see." A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock. "Is there an up-train?" she asked. "When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can I tell you the difference? And she's so different, so ugly and vulgar, in the light of this squabble. No, like you I've never known one. It's another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this if she had to be horrid.