ted error (for she
indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely
living thing that she had caught and could keep--keep vivid and helpless
in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She
had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window,
she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet
her.

X

Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of
the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a
question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you
shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the
railway will carry it."

The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose
there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was
in her ejaculation of "Oh!"--after which she glanced about her for a
place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events
that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda
could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril
was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest.
At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the
sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to
legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the
warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and
presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear
everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her
attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in.
"Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her
cloak.

"Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.

"I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing."

"Distinctly with the threat of enforcement--what would be called, I
suppose, coercion."

"What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth.

"Why, legal, don't you know?--what he calls setting the lawyers at you."

"Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested
curiosity.

"That's what he calls it," said Fleda.

Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed
lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only
with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a
slight chi