CHAPTER VII "I suppose he means them—in the first place, at least—to try to talk you over."!

"But why on earth?" Mrs. Gereth's sad eyes were fixed on her. "Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to him."

There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an arm. "Don't blame him—don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to say to him except on another footing." "That and several other things." "You've come down to it, miss, already?"