The Spoils of Poynton

that it would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with her own silly self?

Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the fact—since one was facing facts—that but the other day his strong arms must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to reflection. She herself had no beauty, and her permissions were the stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room—a consciousness of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out; at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protected error (for she indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely living thing that she had caught and could keep—keep vivid and helpless in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window, she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet her.

X

Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a question. 'His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the railway will carry it.'

The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was in her ejaculation of 'Oh!'—after which she glanced about her for a place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest. At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in. 'Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?' asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her cloak.

'Oh, that's what I should call it!' Fleda laughed, to her own surprise.

'I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing.'

'Distinctly with the threat of enforcement—what would be called, I suppose, coercion.'

'What sort of coercion?' said Mrs. Gereth.

'Why, legal, don't you know?—what he calls setting the lawyers at you.'

'Is that what he calls it?' She seemed to speak with disinterested curiosity.

'That's what he calls it,' said Fleda.

Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. 'Oh, the lawyers!' she exclaimed lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. 'Is he going to send them down here?'

'I dare say he thinks it may come to that.'

'The lawyers can scarcely do the packing,' Mrs. Gereth humorously remarked.

'I suppose he means them—in the first place, at least—to try to talk you over.'

'In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?'

Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could disconcert her. 'I'm afraid I don't know.'

'Didn't you ask?' Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, 'What then were you doing all the while?'

'I didn't ask very much,' said her companion. 'He has been gone some time. The great thing seemed to be to understand clearly that he wouldn't be content with anything less than what he mentioned.'

'My just giving everything back?'

'Your just giving everything back.'

'Well, darling, what did you tell him?' Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired.

Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now committed herself to betray. 'I told him I would tell you!' She smiled, but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth had begun to look at her with some fixedness.

'Did he seem very angry?'

'He seemed very sad. He takes it very hard,' Fleda added.

'And how does she take it?'

'Ah, that—that I felt a delicacy about asking.'

'So you didn't ask?' The words had the note of surprise.