"If you do any such thing, you shall never see me again,—absolutely, literally never!" "His engagement to marry? Why, it's just that engagement we loathe!"!

"I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to remark without solemnity. CHAPTER III

"You've diverged uncommonly far!"—Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own, measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was all the more content he should thus see she had acted, as the cost of it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not moved her!" "Rather! But not till after the public marriage." Mrs. Gereth seemed to muse; then she brought out: "She'll live there alone." "You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only that one time," Fleda observed.