"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed. In her bewildered horror she tried to think. "Have they come back?"!

"She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance," Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly wouldn't have come." "That's your great feeling about him," Fleda said; "but how, after what has happened, can it be his about you?"

"She never saw it at all, she never looked at it!" cried Mrs. Gereth. "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!" "If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.