Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last. "I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how," said Mrs. Gereth.!

"He recognized rot! You know what I think of him." Fleda knew; she had no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one—it was her sole, faint flicker of passion—to the extent of declaring that he was too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!—it was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the other day, the situation changed." "Then you think I ought to have told her?"

"He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen. Fleda turned away. "Thank you." "That and several other things."