"Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?" Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you know, why did you come?"!

"What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up—what will you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know." "I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don't you see? That's exactly what I wrote her this morning."

He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed, she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was—or rather, all that there was not—in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?" "Well, I shall, thank God! Till then"—and with this, for the first time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand—"don't desert me." Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she holds out!"