nted me to let myself go, and I've 'gone' quite far enough to
discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful
things about him. You'll tell me I make myself out worse than I am,"
said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude a
quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even
perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out
"bad"--it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to
her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry
to the young man. "I don't care for anything you think," she declared,
"because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it
makes up for everything!"

This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute,
her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that
she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to
come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his
kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again
from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the
majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after
I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which
I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that
I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back--is it a
part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?"

There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and
in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had
been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of
rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an
instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She
herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet
innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an
arm. "Don't blame him--don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for
me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made
him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to
say to him except on another footing."

Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing?
What other footing?"

"The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and
white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up