. This communication made her easier, if only by its
acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied
recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate
"comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after
their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go
forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw
it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now
wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to
make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of
such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression,
quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would
utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as
much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess
seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's
three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after
her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded
bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she
should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor
give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs.
Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had
even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of
something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a
personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she
would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after
with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had
a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare
floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when
her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild
enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a
week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of
going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with
much appearance of truth, that _they_ are going--for an indefinite time.
That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've
turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a
week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks.

Her arrival took the form of a