plenty of time."

Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs.
Brigstock's certain effect on her--the effect of the temper the old lady
showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably
continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you
'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you
didn't--not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you _do_, with your
extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied."

"You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only
that one time," Fleda observed.

"By Jove, I did--for _you_! It was only for you."

Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not
trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She
had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye."

Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of
his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house.
He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such
times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff
gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter--" he
began. He began, but there he left it.

"You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!"
Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the
old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for
yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If
she doesn't let you off, it will be because she _is_ attached to you."

"She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow
know?--except with _you_!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of
the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her
really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this
betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her
retreat--harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all
she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he
thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the
core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only
the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly
sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right
poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he
whispered, "that she