"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. Herrick's eyes fixed her with their deep pity and their deeper apprehension. "There are few things so bad as that," she said slowly, "and those are the ones we must not touch."
Flora paused a moment on the brink of her last plunge. "Do you think what I am going to do is such a thing as that?"