d--it was unexpectedly merciful. "It
will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The
train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in
farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we
_have_ lost--"

"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.

"You'll all the same come abroad with me?"

"It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask,
whatever you need, that I will always do."

"I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant
if this were not practically a demand for penal submission--for a
surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But
there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs.
Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together."

"Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she
stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had
already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her
companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two
men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and
window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had
gone.

XX

There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the
rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either
from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite
relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her
surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her
brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of
pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she
supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she
couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of
her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own
sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed
her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a
cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another
direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she
couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the
terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the
stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The