with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda
knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him
to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them, and
made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a
silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow
of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this
was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she
speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put
him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that
he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back
for Mona.

From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say
to his chattering so to an underhand "companion," who was all but paid,
this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more
repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she
privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she
had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his
mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and
that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand
over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn't this practical
unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire,
as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close.
She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to
see Mrs. Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication,
into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to
hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug
a counter-mine. Besides, people _were_ saying that she fastened like a
leech on other people--people who had houses where something was to be
picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now
distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had
almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery,
suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to
exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering,
turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go
up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at
West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him
justice, never