Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired. "Fearfully?" broke from the girl. Somehow, at the word, she was startled.!

"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no doubt of my being on hers." CHAPTER XXII

Fleda hesitated; she felt herself reddening. "I've only said your son wants it. I haven't said I do." "Superstitious?" "What then did she mean to do?"