her on his knees; she fell back with
closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank
her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid
consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her
tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal
seem only his--made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly,
as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however,
they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than
before--all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it,
he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which
he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own:
"I'm saved, I'm saved,--I _am_! I'm ready for anything. I have your
word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he
needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game.

She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he
shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon--her sense
of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we
must _wait_!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by
your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where,
your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't
there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having
anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What
business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her
own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!"

Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome
process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but
why is it hideous for _me_?"

"Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently.

"_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count
on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but
what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you
to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I
hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole
thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had
already applied for the license; the very invitations were half
addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It
was none of _my_