"Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours, and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it."
"I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen exclaimed.
"Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no doubt of my being on hers."
"Then of course she won't like your changing."
"I dare say she won't like it at all."
"Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?"
"I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall naturally have a great deal of discussion—if she consents to discuss the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three days."
"I see you think she may refuse to discuss it at all," said Owen.
"I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard with her pride."
Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. "I suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?" This might have been the first time it had occurred to him.
"You know better than I," said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance.
"I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as clever as you I might hope to get round her." Owen hesitated; then he went on: "In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that will really fetch her."
"Neither do I, as yet. I must think—I must pray!" the girl pursued, smiling. "I can only say to you that I'll try. I want to try, you know—I want to help you." He stood looking at her so long on this that she added with much distinctness: "So you must leave me, please, quite alone with her. You must go straight back."
"Back to the inn?"
"Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow."
He turned about vaguely for his hat.
"There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid."
"Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?"
"I've got a perfect case—I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's simple stealing."
"I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to remark without solemnity.
"It's none of their business, is it?" was Owen's unexpected rejoinder. Fleda had already noted that no one so slow could ever have had such rapid transitions.
She showed her amusement. "They've a much better right to say it's none of mine."
"Well, at any rate, you don't call her names."
Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she holds out!"
Owen gave her a gloomy glance; then he blew a speck off the crown of his hat. "But if you do have a set-to with her?"
He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know what you mean by a set-to."
"Well, if she calls you names."
"I don't think she'll do that."
"What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up—what will you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know."
"She may very well not like it; but everything depends. I must see what I shall do. You mustn't worry about me."
She spoke with decision, but Owen seemed still unsatisfied. "You won't go away, I hope?"
"Go away?"
"If she does take it ill of you."
Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You must have patience and see."
"Of course I must," said Owen—"of course, of course." But he took no more advantage of the open door than to say: "You want me to be off, and I'm off in a minute. Only, before I go, please answer me a question. If you should leave my mother, where would you go?"
Fleda smiled again. "I haven't the least idea."
"I suppose you'd go back to London."
"I haven't the least idea," Fleda repeated.
"You don't—a—live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain about it.
Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I won't leave your mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her absolutely."
"I believe you will, if you look at her like that!"
She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in her pale, fine little face—a light that, while, for all return, at first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own. "I'll make her see it—I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed; but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken it was the sense of those seconds of silence.
"When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can I tell you the difference? And she's so different, so ugly and vulgar, in the light of this squabble. No, like you I've never known one. It's another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this if she had to be horrid.
"Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things afterwards—for she was to think of them forever—she wondered in what tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth had come in.
"No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that parlor-maid.