more intimately together, so a person deeply in her debt
would simply have to stand and meet what was to come. There were ways in
which she could sharply incommode such a person, and not only with the
best conscience in the world, but with a sort of brutality of good
intentions. One of the straightest of these strokes, Fleda saw, would be
the dance of delight over the mystery Mrs. Gereth had laid bare--the
loud, lawful, tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like
any other lucky discoverer, she would take possession of the fortunate
island. She was nothing if not practical: almost the only thing she took
account of in her young friend's soft secret was the excellent use she
could make of it--a use so much to her taste that she refused to feel a
hindrance in the quality of the material. Fleda put into Mrs. Gereth's
answer to her question a good deal more meaning than it would have
occurred to her a few hours before that she was prepared to put, but she
had on the spot a foreboding that even so broad a hint would live to be
bettered.

"Do you suggest that I shall propose to him to come down here again?"
she presently inquired.

"Dear, no; say that you'll go up to town and meet him." It _was_
bettered, the broad hint; and Fleda felt this to be still more the case
when, returning to the subject before they went to bed, her companion
said: "I make him over to you wholly, you know--to do what you please
with. Deal with him in your own clever way--I ask no questions. All I
ask is that you succeed."

"That's charming," Fleda replied, "but it doesn't tell me a bit, you'll
be so good as to consider, in what terms to write to him. It's not an
answer from you to the message I was to give you."

"The answer to his message is perfectly distinct: he shall have
everything in the place the minute he'll say he'll marry you."

"You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting
him that news?"

"What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I
speak the word myself?"

"Oh, if _you_ speak the word!" the girl murmured very gravely, but happy
at least to know that in this direction Mrs. Gereth confessed herself
warned and helpless. Then she added: "How can I go on living with you on
a footing of which I so deeply disapprove? Thinking as I do that you've
despoiled him far more than is just or merciful--for if I expected you
to take something, I didn't in the least expect you to