"I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had
the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations."
Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that
when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'"
"What then did she mean to do?"
"What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me."
"Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?"
"For you, of course--to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully
designing--that I've taken some sort of possession of you."
Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken
possession."
"Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and
gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between
which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her
that we're singularly intimate."
"I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed.
Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to
know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs.
Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to
find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and
shoving the tea-things about--that was too much for her patience. She
doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made
up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case."
"I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to
say to her," Owen returned.
"She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on
the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona
when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton.
Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried
it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only
knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and
straightest of women."
"That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put
you up to."
"It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and
mine, isn't innocent."
"What did she mean by that?"
"As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had
the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said
she meant that it's excessively unnatural."
Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last.
"Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was
distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep
me off."
"Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her
arms a little and dropping them.
Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand,
but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been
seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to
her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in
discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only
a stone?"
She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and
she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation.
"Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still
some little help for you."
Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more
beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever
understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful--as
beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next
day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now,
again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it
doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say." He
remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself
up. "What I want you to say is that you like me--what I want you to say
is that you pity me." He sprang up and came to her. "What I want you to
say is that you'll _save_ me!"
Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just
now that you're a free man?"
He too hesitated, but he was not checked. "It's just for the reason that
I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry
me."
Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which
quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at
him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still
smile. "Let me hear a little more about your freedom first," she said.
"I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you
disposed of her question."
"I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free."
"What bearing have _her_ feelings, pray?" Fleda asked.
"Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me
up."
"Then why doesn't she do it?"
"She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her."
"Tells her what?" Fleda inquired.
"Why, that I'm in love with _you_!"