o your
engagement?"

"The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It
seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close
to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he
looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed
you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less--I
couldn't help it--about anything or any one else. I wished I had known
you sooner--I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the
world. But it wasn't you who made the difference," he eagerly continued,
"and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she
herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way
she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She
destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just
the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She
wanted to know all the while what was passing between us, between you
and me; and she wouldn't take my solemn assurance that nothing was
passing but what might have directly passed between me and old Mummy.
She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if
you'll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I'll be
hanged if I haven't been good, haven't I? I haven't breathed a breath of
any sort to you, have I? You'd have been down on me hard if I had,
wouldn't you? You're down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren't
you? But I don't care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a
single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her
confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about
it. The way I feel about it, don't you know, is that it had all better
come to an end. You ask me if I don't love her, and I suppose it's
natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half
mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I
_really_ love, and that that person--" Here Owen pulled up short, and
Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the
closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs.
She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness:
it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no
present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which
after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the