"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides—the impression, somehow, of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone." Fleda ingeniously and triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never be in the inventory!" 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.!

"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you were there?" "Then you had much better let Mr. Gereth go, and stay by yourself and make me a pleasant visit. You can talk with him when you like, but it is the first time you've been to see me."

Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out. Fleda shook her head wearily. "No—I was only in love with him!" "I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her large laugh.