CHAPTER XXI "It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and mine, isn't innocent."!

"She knows he would do anything to marry you." The man hesitated. "What can you call it, miss, if it ain't really saved?"

Whatever he said or did, she somehow liked him the better for it. "How can I back her up, Mr. Gereth, when I think, as I tell you, that she has made a great mistake?" "It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"—the visitor met her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy—that friend herself so pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought away absolutely everything!" "The case," said Fleda coldly, "is as I've had the honor to state it."