"Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her that we're singularly intimate." Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now committed herself to betray. "I told him I would tell you!" She smiled, but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth had begun to look at her with some fixedness.!

"Oh, she has dispelled it." "It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and mine, isn't innocent."

She had perceived that he wouldn't speak of Mona without her beginning. After waiting fruitlessly now for him to say more, she continued: "She has been there again? She has seen the state of the house?" Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?" Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing? What other footing?"