"Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I needn't drag you to the station." Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. "You're prodigious! But how shall you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I—" She didn't finish her sentence.!

Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?" "What of that?" asked Fleda.

"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I couldn't do it again." "He hasn't told her so," Fleda said. To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's a rare greatness in your generosity."