get Owen. What she wanted was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully bedevilled—she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'; but it was simply you who had bedevilled him. He would be all right still if I would see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was possible I could want him to marry you."
Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired.
"I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger—the danger of her going home and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue."
"Your issue?" Fleda murmured.
"I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen."
Fleda wondered. "And did you remember the little letter that, with your hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him?"
"Perfectly; my little letter was a model of
