personal
history, as one would make a friend familiar to another friend. And
these past histories and the rooms themselves were leading Flora away
out of her anxious self, were soothing her prying apprehensions, were
giving her a detachment in the present, till what she so anticipated lay
quiescent at the back of her brain.

But it was there. And now and then, when in a gust of wind the lights
and shadows danced on the dim, polished floors, it stirred; and at the
sound of wheels on the drive below it leaped, and all her fears again
were in her face. At such moments the two women did look deeply at each
other, and the suspense, the premonition, hovered in Mrs. Herrick's
eyes. It was as unconscious, as involuntary, as Flora's start at the
swinging of a door; but no question crossed her lips. She let the matter
as severely alone as if it had been a jewel not her own. Yet, it came to
Flora all at once that here, for the first time, she was with one to
whom she could have revealed the sapphire on her neck and yet remain
unchallenged.

"Ah, you're too lovely!" she burst out at last. "It is more than I
deserve that you should take it all like this, as if there really
wasn't anything." The elder lady's eyes wavered a little at the plain
words.

"I'm too deeply doubtful of it to take it any other way," she said.

"That is why I feel most guilty," Flora explained. "For dragging you
into it and then--bringing it into your house." She glanced around at
the high, quiet, damasked room. "Such a thing to happen here!"

"Ah, my dear,"--Mrs. Herrick's laugh was uncertain--"the things that
have happened here--the things that have happened and been endured and
been forgotten! and see," she said, laying her hand on one of the walls,
"the peace of it now!"

Flora wondered. She seemed to feel such distances of life extending yet
beyond her sight as dwindled her, tiny and innocent.

"It isn't what happens, but the way we take it that makes the
afterward," Mrs. Herrick added.

The thought of an afterward had stood very dim in Flora's mind, and
even now that Mrs. Herrick's words confronted her with it she couldn't
fancy what it would be like. She couldn't imagine her existence going on
at all on the other side of failure.

"But suppose," she tremulously urged, "suppose there seemed only one way
to take what had happened to you, and that way, if it failed, would
leave you no afterward at all, no peace, no courage, nothing."

Mrs. Her