"I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations." Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'" "What then did she mean to do?" "What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me." "Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?" "For you, of course--to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully designing--that I've taken some sort of possession of you." Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken possession." "Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her that we're singularly intimate." "I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed. Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs. Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and shoving the tea-things about--that was too much for her patience. She doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case." "I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to say to her," Owen returned. "She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton. Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and straightest of women." "That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put you up to." "It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and mine, isn't innocent." "What did she mean by that?" "As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said she meant that it's excessively unnatural." Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last. "Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep me off." "Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her arms a little and dropping them.