Katharine laid a steadying hand upon the couch, and Opdyke eyed the steadying hand much as if it had been a toad.
"Mr. Opdyke, even in so sad a case as yours, the remedy is quite within your hands," she told him gravely.
Reed's sense of humour came back again to his relief.
"How do you make that out?" he asked her, taking his eyes from the potential hopping toad to rest them on the face before him, a face serenely smug with the consciousness of its own sanctification.
"If you would only trust and believe, would throw your whole nature into tune with spiritual law and order, you could get up off from that couch, tomorrow, and walk down to the post office and back again."
Reed lost the great essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to the central fact.
"It only rests with you how long you are to lie here, Mr. Opdyke," Katharine was reiterating solemnly, yet with the same carefully manufactured smile that had appeared upon her lips simultaneously with the first expressions of her creed.
Reed experienced a sudden wave of physical nausea, as he watched it.
"I wish that I could believe you, Mrs. Brenton," he said dryly. "Unfortunately, it is quite impossible."
Katharine did her best to make her smile more luminous.