"Yes, that's just it," said Edith, impatiently. "You have read so many wild, unnatural stories of life that you are ready to believe anything that is horrible. Listen: I have over four hundred dollars in the bank."
"How did you get it?" asked Laura, quickly.
"I have followed mother's suggestion, and mortgaged the place."
Laura sank into a chair, and became so deathly white that Edith thought she would faint. At last she gasped:
"Don't you see? Even you in your strength can't help yourself. You are being pushed on, too. You said you would not follow mother's advice again, because it always led to trouble. You said, again and again, you would not mortgage the place, and yet you have done it. Now it's all clear. That mortgage will be foreclosed, and then we shall be turned out, and then—" and she covered her face with her hands. "Don't you see," she said, in a muffled tone, "the great black hand reaching out of the darkness and pushing us down and nearer? Oh, that I wasn't afraid to die!"
Edith was startled. Even her positive, healthful nature began to yield to the contagion of Laura's morbid despair. She felt that she must break the spell and be alone. By a strong effort she tried to speak in her natural tone and with confidence. She tried to comfort the desperate woman by endearing epithets, as if she were a child. She spoke of those simple restoratives which are so often and vainly prescribed for mortal wounds, sleep and rest.
"Go to bed, poor child," she urged. "All will look differently in the sunlight to-morrow."
But Laura scarcely seemed to heed her. With weak, uncertain steps she drew near the bed, and turned the light on her mother's thin, flushed face, and stood, with clasped hands, looking wistfully at her.
"Yes, my dear," muttered Mrs. Allen in her delirium, "both your father and myself would give our full approval to your marriage with Mr. Goulden." The poor woman made watching doubly hard to her daughters, since she kept recalling to them the happy past in all its minutiae.
Laura turned to Edith with a smile that was inexpressibly sad, and said, "What a mockery it all is! There seems nothing real in this world but pain and danger. Oh, that I was not afraid to die!"