Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there were nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As The Morning Post still held its peace, she would be, of course, more confident; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs. Gereth's awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed, but much good had that brought forth! To have sent for her now, Fleda felt, was from this point of view wholly natural: she had sent for her to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at Waterbath the refutation of that boast was easy.
Fleda found Mrs. Gereth in modest apartments and with an air of fatigue in her distinguished face—a sign, as she privately remarked, of the strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda felt on her shoulders the return of the load, so that her spirit frankly quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth's free manner always made a joke of weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay.
Fleda thought best to show bravery too, and to show it from the first. 'What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain, without making preparations.'
'Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot!' Mrs. Gereth was most emphatic. 'You're going abroad with me.'
Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. 'To-night—to-morrow?'
'In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now.' Fleda's heart, at this, gave a bound; she wondered to what particular difference in Mrs. Gereth's situation as last known to her it was an allusion. 'I've made my plan,' her friend continued: 'I go for at least a year. We shall go straight to Florence; we can manage there. I of course don't look to you, however,' she added, 'to stay with me all that time. That will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as possible; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm convinced it's quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change; it will put in a decent interval.'
Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. 'How kind you are to me!' she presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. 'You really have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?'
If Mr. Gereth's mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son. Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs. Gereth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she wished. 'Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well!' she said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders and held them at arm's length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. 'You bad, false thing, why didn't you tell me?' Her tone softened her harshness, and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs. Gereth could show patience; it was a part of the general bribe, but it was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could only fumble in a penniless pocket. 'You must perfectly have known at Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and false!' It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her.
'I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking about,' Fleda said.
Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. 'You've done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he's sick with love of you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you.'
Fleda hesitated. 'Has he informed
Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. 'How could he, when our situation is such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so tortuous you conceal everything?'
'Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in town?' Fleda asked.
'He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you.'
Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda's own sense of responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance; she could only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce, after a moment, a question. 'How then do you come to know that your son has ever thought—'
'That he would give his ears to get you?' Mrs. Gereth broke in. 'I had a visit from Mrs. Brigstock.'
Fleda opened her eyes. 'She went down to Ricks?'
'The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything.'
Fleda shook her head sadly; she was more startled than she cared to show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock's, which, with a simplicity equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having produced the hush of the last ten days. 'There are things she doesn't know!' she presently exclaimed.
'She knows he would do anything to marry you.'
'He hasn't told her so,' Fleda said.
'No, but he has told you. That's better still!' laughed Mrs. Gereth. 'My dear child,' she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of blind profanity, 'don't try to make yourself out better than you are.
