s if there might
be a great many others too. "Please don't say anything about Mona."

She didn't understand. "About Mona?"

"About its being _her_ that thinks she has gone too far." This was still
slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. "It mustn't seem to come
from _her_ at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse."

Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about
explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep
consideration of what might make "Mummy" better. She couldn't see as yet
at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he
should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the
question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled
presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before
her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent
rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for
disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his
mother had left him--he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural
avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught
him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so
sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before
Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by
another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even
now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in
its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do
with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and
carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him
in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of
what she had lost--quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the
privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though
she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than
one might have supposed--assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined.

"Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be
the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours,
and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it."

"I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen
exclaimed.

"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no
doubt of my bei