"_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had already applied for the license; the very invitations were half addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It was none of _my_ doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do; and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she trusts me, if possible, still less." Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to that, naturally, she has reason." "Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away, simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you--not to call looking--till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!" "You're not all right--you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made _you_ say them." But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?" "I?--" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't break off just on purpose to leave it to _her_. I didn't break off so that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me." The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in self-reproof. "There _isn't_ a thing to be said against you, and I don't know what nonsense you make me talk! You _have_ pleased me, and you've been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go. Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said entirely too much. You must leave me alone--forever." "Forever?" Owen gasped. "I mean unless everything is different." "Everything _is_ different--when I _know_!" Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace. "You know nothing--and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at this point."