"If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda. Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to consider. "To his club, do you mean?" "Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to him." "How do _I_ know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth asked. "Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled. Then she added: "His silence, _her_ silence, our hearing nothing at all--what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between them?" Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him back to her." "Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't know--you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me." Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her companion had completely changed its ground. She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes. "You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath." "Then where is he?" poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up, however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: "You simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be. You slash into it," cried Fleda finely, "with a great pair of shears, you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath he's there to wind everything up."