Owen
was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was
with this idea she had bearded me in my den. 'What won't a mother do,
you know?'--that was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother
do indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to
break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from
the moment she opened on _you_, from the moment she denounced Owen's
falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it
was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her
child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was
studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest, I
didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage
hadn't taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I
showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared
his responsibility. It was she who had killed _him_--it was she who had
destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was
estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She
reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance too, but she admitted that
she hadn't come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was
not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted
was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully
bedeviled--she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'--but it was
simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would
see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was
possible I could want him to marry you."

Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her
interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her
breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere
expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the
air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that
came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in
cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.

"I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger--the danger of her going home
and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to
learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off
my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue."

"Your iss