that Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently said to her with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you are labouring under some great mistake."
Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look: it was the flicker of a mild, muddled willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled everything, "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an explanation. I may owe somebody one—I dare say I do. But not you—no!"
"But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?" Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to ask, if she came to ask any at all."
Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you."
Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of those bad women in a play?"
The remark was disastrous: Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away as from a presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had a vain sense that her good humour, in which there was an idea, was taken for imperti-
