"I'm dashed if I want to!" Owen honestly declared. "But what's a fellow to do if she won't meet a fellow?" "What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both of us?"!

CHAPTER III "Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?"

"My just giving everything back?" "Merciful powers, how you worship him!" Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned. It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an accident with pain; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth soundlessly, wearily wept. Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the simple interrogation: "Mona?"