haven't repeated it to your mother." She had hated, at Ricks, to talk
with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could
speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to
notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him
and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him
all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a
corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. "You can easily see that, as
she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less
certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions
and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't
seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she
thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she
believes she may at last tire Mona out." That, in all conscience, Fleda
felt was lucid enough.

So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel.
"So far as that goes," he promptly declared, "she _has_ at last tired
Mona out." He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity.

Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him.
"Do you mean your marriage is off?"

Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. "God knows, Miss Vetch, where
or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the
point things have reached, isn't _on_. I haven't seen Mona for ten days,
and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every
week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't
budged from town." Then he suddenly broke out: "If she _does_ chuck me,
will mother come round?"

Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test--felt
that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to
push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion
would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the
conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That
conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the
place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less
urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth--there was a limit to the
impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most
to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he
had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it