"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you were there?" Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."!

"That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling. "I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you really haven't," Mrs. Gereth declared. "If Mona has got him—"

"I dare say they are—or that Mona is." Mrs. Gereth reflected again; she had a bright idea. "If I don't give in, I'll be hanged if she'll not break off." "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." "I'm glad, then, it didn't arrive. Shouldn't you like him to go?" Fleda asked.