o Fleda: "Don't think I shall be
a bit affected if I'm here to see it when he comes again to make up to
you."

"He won't do that," the girl replied. Then she added, smiling: "But if
he should be guilty of such bad taste, it wouldn't be nice of you not to
be disgusted."

"I'm not talking of disgust; I'm talking of its opposite," said Mrs.
Gereth.

"Of its opposite?"

"Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an
exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you
like; but what conceivable good will it do?"

Fleda wondered. "To me, do you mean?"

"Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk
about."

"The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any
sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we
shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added.

Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders.

"It certainly isn't worth it!"

Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain
inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you,
you know--that there should be the less possibility of anything
painful."

"Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?"

"I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained.

"Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd
expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever."

"You'll last quite as long--" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated.

Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of
experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?"

The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an
amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous."

That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the
protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in
the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at
which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said
nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had
come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen
Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew
that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and
that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew,
without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had