at was what his silence said. What
was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She
grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was
too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt
differently. Fleda Vetch didn't suspect him at first of feeling
differently to _her_, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she
was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something
to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels
about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had
surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former
tie; and there was something in Owen's behavior now, something in his
very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But
whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn't a
former tie, she wasn't any tie at all; she was only a deep little person
for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the
very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately
happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the
small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own
affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a
tie--at least what _she_ called one--for Owen. The old one, at any rate,
was Mona--Mona whom he had known so very much longer.

They walked far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by
the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand
to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively
take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was
a real separation. She was on his mother's side, she belonged to his
mother's life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to
Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and
it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to
the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at
it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to
the bridegroom's mother, would of course not invite any such girl as
Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different
ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked
at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen's part, with an
expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of hi