It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the poor girl fell weakly into a chair. "What on earth have you done?" "No. I'm tired of them: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her. She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low, it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which one worked kept one up. For you I could—I can still. Nothing will have mattered if she's not there."!

"I see. And you were never sure." "Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow."

Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?" "Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and that it was near at hand." Mrs. Gereth jumped at this. "So that she'll break altogether if I keep them?"