"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda. The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her allusion was improper, even if she herself wasn't; Mrs. Brigstock's emotion simplified: it came to the same thing. "I'm quite ready," that lady said to Owen rather mildly and woundedly. "I do want to speak to you very much."!

"Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!" "Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.

"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only that one time," Fleda observed. "So much that they're all, and that she can let everything else absolutely depend upon them?" "The shilling's my shilling," said Mrs. Gereth.