? How did
she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of
which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest
of her life she debated. "Yes," she said at last, "if your marriage is
really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken."

"That's just what makes Mona hesitate!" Owen honestly exclaimed. "I mean
the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up."

Fleda thought an instant. "You mean makes her hesitate to keep you--not
hesitate to renounce you?"

Owen looked a trifle bewildered. "She doesn't see the use of hanging on,
as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully
keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the
only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me
time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much.
She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so
hard, don't you see?"

"I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered
her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about
_that_!" the girl declared.

Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. "You think, then, as she does,
that I _must_ send down the police?"

The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much
she was failing him. She had the sense of "chucking" him too. "No, no,
not yet!" she said, though she had really no other and no better course
to prescribe. "Doesn't it occur to you," she asked in a moment, "that if
Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very
high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by
your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready--is that
it!--to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had
entered upon with joy."

Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with
success--a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with
decision: "Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself," he added;
"she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or
not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want _me_. If she can't get
them she doesn't want anything at all."

This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. "She takes such an interest in
them?"

"So it appears."

"So much that they're _all_, and that she can let everything else
absolutely depend upon them?"

Owen