d to be alone with
you, or of your tearing me to pieces. I'll answer any question that you
can possibly dream of putting to me."

"I'm the proper person to answer Mrs. Brigstock's questions," Owen broke
in again, "and I'm not a bit less ready to meet them than you are." He
was firmer than she had ever seen him: it was as if she had not known he
could be so firm.

"But she'll only have been here a few minutes. What sort of a visit is
that?" Fleda cried.

"It has lasted long enough for my purpose. There was something I wanted
to know, but I think I know it now."

"Anything you don't know I dare say I can tell you!" Owen observed as he
impatiently smoothed his hat with the cuff of his coat.

Fleda by this time desired immensely to keep his companion, but she saw
she could do so only at the cost of provoking on his part a further
exhibition of the sheltering attitude, which he exaggerated precisely
because it was the first thing, since he had begun to "like" her, that
he had been able frankly to do for her. It was not in her interest that
Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that
benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently
said to her, with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you're
laboring under some great mistake."

Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly
than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look; it was the flicker of a
certain willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled
everything. "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing
what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an
explanation. I may owe somebody one--I dare say I do; but not you, no!"

"But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?"
Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to
ask, if she came to ask any at all."

Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I
believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."

Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of
those bad women in a play?"

The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was
lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a
presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had
a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken
for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her all