"So you didn't ask?" The words had the note of surprise. "To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic; but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr. Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!"!

"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides—the impression, somehow, of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone." Fleda ingeniously and triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never be in the inventory!" Fleda mused a moment. "That's what she came to do with me," she then honestly returned. "But what did she expect to get of you, with your opposition so marked from the first?"

"Give everything back?" Fleda looked into the pot again and uttered her question with a briskness that she felt to be a little overdone. "Why, by putting the question well before you; by being so eloquent that I shall persuade you, shall act upon you; by making you sorry for having gone so far," she said boldly; "by simply and earnestly asking it of you, in short; and by reminding you at the same time that it's the first thing I ever have so asked. Oh, you've done things for me—endless and beautiful things," she exclaimed; "but you've done them all from your own generous impulse. I've never so much as hinted to you to lend me a postage-stamp." "Wherever he is, I can bear it," Fleda said. "But I haven't the least idea where he is." "The shilling's my shilling," said Mrs. Gereth.