off the premises.

Her heart failed her, after Owen had returned to London, with the
ugliness of this duty--with the ugliness, indeed, of the whole close
conflict. She saw nothing of Mrs. Gereth that day; she spent it in
roaming with sick sighs, in feeling, as she passed from room to room,
that what was expected of her companion was really dreadful. It would
have been better never to have had such a place than to have had it and
lose it. It was odious to _her_ to have to look for solutions: what a
strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental
tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring! Was it
Owen who was mainly responsible for that poverty? Fleda couldn't think
so when she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gereth
would still have been welcome to have her seat by the Poynton fire. The
fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying one saw no very
different course for Owen to take made her all the rest of that aching
day find her best relief in the mercy of not having yet to face her
hostess. She dodged and dreamed and romanced away the time; instead of
inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which
a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sentient solitude,
up to a mere fairy tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace
with which she would have filled the air if only something might have
been that could never have been.

V

"I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on
the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to
say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she
"required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman
would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn
from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of
her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics,
diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with
this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to
be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble:
it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had so patiently and consummately
wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there
like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch
from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would
die a