the
house. However, the worst is over."

"Do you really think so?" Fleda presently inquired. "I mean, does he,
after the fact, as it were, accept it?"

"Owen--what I've done? I haven't the least idea," said Mrs. Gereth.

"Does Mona?"

"You mean that she'll be the soul of the row?"

"I hardly see Mona as the 'soul' of anything," the girl replied. "But
have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?"

"Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't
know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap."

"But wouldn't they have gone down as soon as you left?"

"They may not have known of my leaving." Fleda wondered afresh; it
struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn't have flashed
from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to
gather, even in Mona's breast, it would probably discharge itself in
some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange;
but when she pressed Mrs. Gereth for some explanation of it, that lady
only replied, with her brave irony: "Oh, I took their breath away!" She
had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed
was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign?

All this was exciting, but Fleda's spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the
chamber embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the
objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been
reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it
was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden's bower.
It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined--old
chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her
friend's genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl
in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there
was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours
that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look
gray, somehow, and loveless. She couldn't care for such things when they
came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned
them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton
dishonored; she had cared for it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the
parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before
going to bed she had walked about with Mrs. Gereth and seen at whose
expense the whole house had been furni