"Why, letting me tell her a dozen things she can have." "To give her the house!" Mrs. Gereth brought up the words from the depth of the unspeakable. The effort was like the moan of an autumn wind; it was in the power of such an image to make her turn pale.!

"That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at all?" This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute, her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back—is it a part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?"

Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you." "The whole house," said Fleda uncompromisingly. She thought of her lovely room. "Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What then were you doing all the while?"