"What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both of us?" 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?"!

She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar which, in her dismay, she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant, acted upon her as a wild solicitation. "I must go there." She had scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling check. Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. "How kind you are to me!" she presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. "You really have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?"

"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put you up to." "That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at all?" "Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested curiosity.