CHAPTER XV "Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap."!

"Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone. Mrs. Gereth stared. "Do you mean he's at Waterbath? Well, that's your own affair. I can bear it if you can."

"I explained to her fully your position and put before her much more strongly than she liked what seemed to me her absolute duty." 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. All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim—that of taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself. Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said: "Yesterday morning?"