Page:The Spoils of Poynton (London, William Heinemann, 1897).djvu/267

Rh "But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?"

"How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool than he. And what else had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he was married."

Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?"

"At a Registry-office—like a pair of low atheists."

The girl hesitated. "What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.

"Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th at Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the game, some outwitting of me. It's known there has been a row with me."

Fleda was mystified. "People surely know at Poynton," she objected, "if, as you say, she's there."