our
between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended
by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever."

"Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked.

"No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for
three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid
image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as
if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded.

"I'm trying not to think of myself."

"Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you _bear_ to think?"

Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come
into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand--I don't understand!" she
broke out.

"_I_ do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no
obligation at the time you saw him last--when you sent him, hating her
as he did, back to her."

"If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he
recognized one?"

"He recognized rot! You know what _I_ think of him." Fleda knew; she had
no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one--it was her
sole, faint flicker of passion--to the extent of declaring that he was
too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!--it
was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing
you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the
other day, the situation changed."

Fleda wondered. "The other day?"

"It came to Mona's knowledge--I can't tell you how, but it came--that
the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent
them for you, but it was _her_ I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was
too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the
full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her."

"Determined her to what?"

"To act, to take means."

"To take means?" Fleda repeated.

"I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how,"
said Mrs. Gereth.

Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this
allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a
little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the
simple interrogation: "Mona?"

"Why not? She's a brute."

"But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"

"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give
you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she coul