detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had
now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was
the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most
touched by that, in tons, she had lost--the beauty that, charged upon
big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain
to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of
her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open
arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with
which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid
poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that
had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early
judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any
other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the
desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been
strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no
catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was
complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have
drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and
she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they
might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps
already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They
were nobody's at all--too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be
reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they
had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source
of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating.

It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be
with you at 11.30--don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over,
but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only
an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the
previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came,
Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement.
Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by
the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the
grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps
truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She
was not, like