If Fleda handed this communication to her friend as a triumphant gage of the innocence of the young man's heart, her elation lived but a moment after Mrs. Gereth had pounced upon the tell-tale spot in it. "Why in the world, then," that lady cried, "does he still not breathe a breath about the day, the day, the day?" She repeated the word with a crescendo of superior acuteness; she proclaimed that nothing could be more marked than its absence—an absence that simply spoke volumes. What did it prove in fine but that she was producing the effect she had toiled for—that she had settled or was rapidly settling Mona? Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the simple interrogation: "Mona?"!

"Well, if she calls you names." "Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.

He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know what you mean by a set-to." Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!" "Why, letting me tell her a dozen things she can have."