ain was off, but, moving quickly
beside it, while Fleda leaned inscrutably forth, Mrs. Gereth grasped her
friend's hand and looked up with wonderful eyes. "Only let yourself go,
darling--only let yourself go!"

XIII

That she desired to ask no questions Mrs. Gereth conscientiously proved
by closing her lips tight after Fleda had gone to London. No letter from
Ricks arrived at West Kensington, and Fleda, with nothing to communicate
that could be to the taste of either party, forbore to open a
correspondence. If her heart had been less heavy she might have been
amused to perceive how much rope this reticence of Ricks seemed to
signify to her that she could take. She had at all events no good news
for her friend save in the sense that her silence was not bad news. She
was not yet in a position to write that she had "cut in;" but neither,
on the other hand, had she gathered material for announcing that Mona
was undisseverable from her prey. She had made no use of the pen so
glorified by Mrs. Gereth to wake up the echoes of Waterbath; she had
sedulously abstained from inquiring what in any quarter, far or near,
was said or suggested or supposed. She only spent a matutinal penny on
"The Morning Post;" she only saw, on each occasion, that that inspired
sheet had as little to say about the imminence as about the abandonment
of certain nuptials. It was at the same time obvious that Mrs. Gereth
triumphed on these occasions much more than she trembled, and that with
a few such triumphs repeated she would cease to tremble at all. What was
most manifest, however, was that she had had a rare preconception of the
circumstances that would have ministered, had Fleda been disposed, to
the girl's cutting in. It was brought home to Fleda that these
circumstances would have particularly favored intervention; she was
quickly forced to do them a secret justice. One of the effects of her
intimacy with Mrs. Gereth was that she had quite lost all sense of
intimacy with any one else. The lady of Ricks had made a desert around
her, possessing and absorbing her so utterly that other partakers had
fallen away. Hadn't she been admonished, months before, that people
considered they had lost her and were reconciled on the whole to the
privation? Her present position in the great unconscious town defined
itself as obscure: she regarded it at any rate with eyes suspicious of
that lesson. She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in