hought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course
of your having been at Ricks. If I didn't find you I thought I might
perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on.

"I'm sorry he's out. He's always out--all day long."

Mrs. Brigstock's round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?"

"All day long," Fleda smiled.

"Leaving you quite to yourself?"

"A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr.
Gereth,--" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their
sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the
movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him
at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed
to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose
for which you would like my father to call on you?"

Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be
unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance:
"I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch's being in town; but of
course the letter hadn't arrived when you left home."

"No, it hadn't arrived. I came up for the night--I've several matters to
attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her
companions to the other, "I'm afraid I've interrupted your
conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point,
had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been
confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was;
she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person
Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of
person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see
her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of
which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind
that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark
it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor
blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated
like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the
kindness of compassion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to
do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite
prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it
wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it
wanted to do something different f