"He doesn't dream I've ever thought of him," said Fleda. "Why should he, if you didn't?" Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."!

"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two." "The whole thing has indeed been wretched, and I can easily conceive its effect upon her," Fleda said.

"The strain of what?" Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected: she became limp and weak again; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice. She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first time: "Poynton's gone?" "He recognized rot! You know what I think of him." Fleda knew; she had no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one—it was her sole, faint flicker of passion—to the extent of declaring that he was too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!—it was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the other day, the situation changed."