"Don't you think it—I mean that she ought to give them up?" "She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.!

"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a bench." Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.

CHAPTER XX "I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to say to her," Owen returned. "How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked.