Page:The Spoils of Poynton (London, William Heinemann, 1897).djvu/257

Rh a scratch. But I'm too tired—I very nearly don't care."

"You must sit down then till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a bench."

"No. I'm tired of them: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her. She believed however that if the flame might for the moment burn low it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which one worked kept one up. For you I could—I can still. Nothing will have mattered if she's not there."

There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no voice to utter it: it was the thing that between them, since her arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was able to breathe: "And if she is there—if she's there already?"

Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when—it came from sad eyes as well as from lips barely moved—it was unexpectedly merciful. "It will be very hard." That was all now; and it was poignantly simple. The train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we have lost"

"If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again.