"And do you say you love her?" "I must in common decency let him know that I've talked of the matter with you," she said to her hostess that evening. "What answer do you wish me to write to him?"!

"Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to him." Mrs. Gereth watched Fleda and considered. "You haven't any idea if they are waiting for the things?"

"Nor his mother, miss—not a soul of them back. A pack o' servants in charge—not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for care-takers! Some rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night." Then as a great wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little waiting room. "Awkward for you, miss—I see!" "Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone. 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.