"You don't--a--live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain about it. Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I _won't_ leave your mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her absolutely." "I believe you will, if you look at her like that!" She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in her pale, fine little face--a light that, while, for all return, at first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own. "I'll make her see it--I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed; but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken it was the sense of those seconds of silence. "When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can I tell you the difference? And _she_'s so different, so ugly and vulgar, in the light of this squabble. No, like _you_ I've never known one. It's another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this if she had to be horrid. "Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things afterwards--for she was to think of them forever--she wondered in what tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth had come in. "No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that parlor-maid. "Please open the house-door," said Fleda.