Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last. "Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in town?" Fleda asked.!

Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you know, why did you come?" "I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.

Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?" "We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated. "That's all we are now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness: she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of everything. Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?"