had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window, she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet her. X Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the railway will carry it." The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was in her ejaculation of "Oh!"--after which she glanced about her for a place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest. At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in. "Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her cloak. "Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise. "I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing." "Distinctly with the threat of enforcement--what would be called, I suppose, coercion." "What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth. "Why, legal, don't you know?--what he calls setting the lawyers at you." "Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested curiosity. "That's what he calls it," said Fleda. Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. "Is he going to send them down here?" "I dare say he thinks it may come to that." "The lawyers can scarcely do the packing," Mrs. Gereth humorously remarked. "I suppose he means them--in the first place, at least--to try to talk you over." "In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?" Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could disconcert her. "I'm afraid I don't know." "Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What then were you doing all the while?"