visitor would
be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the
consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the
instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth
should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen's pause was the matter
of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their
eyes holding each other's eyes and their ears catching the suggestion,
still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had
begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a
grasp of her arm. "You're surely able to guess," he said, with his voice
dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a
pressure--"you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?"

The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him:
"Your mother!"

The door opened, and the smutty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs.
Brigstock!"

XV

Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants
of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a
small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was
the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a
perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that
subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it
off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs.
Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any
rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of
some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs.
Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as
of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements
made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled
by Fleda's relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a
longer space by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising
in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of
Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never
paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so
employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but
never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as constituting a bond.
She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a
bond, on