Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?" "Oh yes, I told her exactly, and that you had been most awfully kind, and that I had placed the whole thing in your hands."!

"To give them up?" Fleda hesitated again. Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace. "You know nothing—and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at this point."

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?" "Good-bye, Mr. Gereth—I must get on!" she declared with a cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away, though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk, every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it, glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that she was on the point of bursting into tears. "You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting him that news?"