ile hesitated, lingered for
some minutes where she had been left, feeling secretly that her fate
still had her in hand. It had put her face to face with Owen Gereth, and
it evidently meant to keep her so. She was reminded afresh of two
things: one of which was that, though she judged her friend's rigor, she
had never really had the story of the scene enacted in the great
awestricken house between the mother and the son weeks before--the day
the former took to her bed in her over-throw; the other was, that at
Ricks as at Poynton, it was before all things her place to accept
thankfully a usefulness not, she must remember, universally
acknowledged. What determined her at the last, while Mrs. Gereth
disappeared in the shrubbery, was that, though she was at a distance
from the house and the drawing-room was turned the other way, she could
absolutely see the young man alone there with the sources of his pain.
She saw his simple stare at his tapestries, heard his heavy tread on his
carpets and the hard breath of his sense of unfairness. At this she went
to him fast.

VIII

"I asked for you," he said when she stood there, "because I heard from
the flyman who drove me from the station to the inn that he had brought
you here yesterday. We had some talk, and he mentioned it."

"You didn't know I was here?"

"No. I knew only that you had had, in London, all that you told me, that
day, to do; and it was Mona's idea that after your sister's marriage you
were staying on with your father. So I thought you were with him still."

"I am," Fleda replied, idealizing a little the fact. "I'm here only for
a moment. But do you mean," she went on, "that if you had known I was
with your mother you wouldn't have come down?"

The way Owen hung fire at this question made it sound more playful than
she had intended. She had, in fact, no consciousness of any intention
but that of confining herself rigidly to her function. She could already
see that, in whatever he had now braced himself for, she was an element
he had not reckoned with. His preparation had been of a different
sort--the sort congruous with his having been careful to go first and
lunch solidly at the inn. He had not been forced to ask for her, but she
became aware, in his presence, of a particular desire to make him feel
that no harm could really come to him. She might upset him, as people
called it, but she would take no advantage of having done so. She had
never seen a