should fail he would be
completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he
had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to
aggravate the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs.
Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the
young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the
negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to
Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her
return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to
failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness; it was so
conspicuous that failure would be the reward of an effective
introduction of Mona. If that abhorred name should be properly invoked
Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance
Owen would certainly retire. His retirement would be into single life,
and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having
practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back
road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed.
There was something _she_ enjoyed; but that was a very different matter.
To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings
that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a
flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been
fathomless and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house,
they spread till they overflowed. He seemed to have made it right for
her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for
him in return nothing that such a confession could make right! How could
it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His
attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate that. But he didn't
believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion.
She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to
be manly was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it,
and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He
had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick
themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having
kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown.

She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there
was in the intensity of the effort required to do so a vibration which
throb