shed. At poor Owen's, from top to
bottom--there wasn't a chair he hadn't sat upon. The maiden aunt had
been exterminated--no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to
think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her
memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old
combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that
gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her
greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth's face, his sad, strange eyes,
fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the
darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed
to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had
looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had
done her the honor to ask her to exert herself in his interest,
confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy.
Hadn't that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him?
Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him
over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the
last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs. Gereth
had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for
an hour at least that she might hate Mrs. Gereth.

Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely
definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again
to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution
that could lead to her going through life without that accident. After
this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had
become, in a few hours, intolerably false; in as few more hours as
possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to
it would be to inform Mrs. Gereth that, to her great regret, she
couldn't be with her now, couldn't cleave to her to the point that
everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of
violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated.
The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across
Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very
necessity of bringing her down. Fleda, in the inconsequence of distress,
wished to have nothing to do with her fall; she had had too much to do
with everything. She was well aware of the importance, before breakfast
and in view o