pansion she freely named, had two
aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his
exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona
with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely
his manner of proceeding.

Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs.
Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of
voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet,
and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the
place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain
steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona
Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in
the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the
even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in
which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss
Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even
romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an
expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and
strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any
perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to
the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret
of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would
probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she
communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself,
without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of
them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently
natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and
pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the
same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church.

The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was
sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There
had been intimacy--oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility--in the
horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to
stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs.
Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were,
found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother
possessing herself of her son, her