"Well, I shall, thank God! Till then"—and with this, for the first time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand—"don't desert me." 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."!

"Yes, that doesn't happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked round afresh at Fleda's home. "Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and that it was near at hand."

"I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't speak of it, don't speak!" "Why, she simply won't marry me, don't you see?" "Write to him that you must see him again," said Mrs. Gereth.