Page:The Spoils of Poynton (London, William Heinemann, 1897).djvu/150

142 yourself off his hands forever. I'll make him understand, you know, if you feel shy. I'd take you up myself, I'd go with you, to spare your being bored: we'd put up at an hotel and we might amuse ourselves a bit. We haven't had much pleasure since we met, have we? But of course that wouldn't suit our book. I should be a bugaboo to Owen—I should be fatally in the way. Your chance is there—your chance is to be alone. For God's sake use it to the right end. If you're in want of money I've a little I can give you. But I ask no questions—not a question as small as your shoe!"

She asked no questions, but she took the most extraordinary things for granted: Fleda felt this still more at the end of a couple of days. On the second of these our young lady wrote to Owen: her emotion had to a certain degree cleared itself—there was something she could briefly say. If she had given everything to Mrs. Gereth and as yet got nothing, so she had on the other hand quickly reacted—it took but a night—against the discouragement of her first check. Her desire to serve him was too passionate, the sense that he counted upon her too sweet: these things caught her up again and gave her a new patience and a new subtlety. It shouldn't really be for nothing that she had given so much; deep within her burned again the resolve to get something back. So what she wrote to Owen was simply that she had had a great scene with his mother, but that he