know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made
up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case."

"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to
say to her," Owen returned.

"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on
the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona
when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.

Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried
it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only
knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and
straightest of women."

"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put
you up to."

"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and
mine, isn't innocent."

"What did she mean by that?"

"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had
the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said
she meant that it's excessively unnatural."

Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.

"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was
distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep
me off."

"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her
arms a little and dropping them.

Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand,
but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been
seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to
her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in
discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only
a stone?"

She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and
she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation.
"Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still
some little help for you."

Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more
beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever
understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful--as
beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next
day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now,
again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it
doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you