f face to face with Owen Gereth.

At the sight of him two fresh waves passed quickly across her heart, one
at the heels of the other. The first was an instant perception that this
encounter was not an accident; the second a consciousness as prompt that
the best place for it was the street. She knew before he told her that
he had been to see her, and the next thing she knew was that he had had
information from his mother. Her mind grasped these things while he said
with a smile: "I saw only your back, but I was sure. I was over the way.
I've been at your house."

"How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked.

"I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you
were there?"

Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you
know, why did you come?"

"Oh, I say!" cried Owen. "Don't add insult to injury. Why in the world
didn't you let me know? I came because I want awfully to see you." He
hesitated, then he added: "I got the tip from mother: she has written to
me--fancy!"

They still stood where they had met. Fleda's instinct was to keep him
there; the more so that she could already see him take for granted that
they would immediately proceed together to her door. He rose before her
with a different air: he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had
done at Ricks, he showed a recovered freshness. Perhaps, however, this
was only because she had scarcely seen him at all as yet in London form,
as he would have called it--"turned out" as he was turned out in town.
In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with the mire, he had
always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume.
This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day; it was as copious
as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never failed of suggestions of the
earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the
birds. There had been days when it struck her as all nature in one pair
of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately
dressed, shining and splendid--that he had a higher hat and light gloves
with black seams, and a spearlike umbrella; but it made him, she soon
decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him--for she never
could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of
his vocabulary--a tremendous pull. Yes, this was for the moment, as he
looked at her, the great fact of their situation--his pull was
tremendous. She