"I do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no obligation at the time you saw him last—when you sent him, hating her as he did, back to her." "Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?"!

"That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling. "Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!" Then with a smile: "We've only diverged."

Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have really loved her, you know," he replied. Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. "You don't believe a word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless, if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your perversity's a thing to howl over. However," the poor woman continued with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of her will, "I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out; for Owen is a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead," she repeated with a quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. "I don't know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak." Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. "You're prodigious in your choice of terms!" she then simply ejaculated.