"If it is either," responded Mrs. Sylvestre, serenely, "I hope it will be Mr. Arbuthnot, as he would have less difficulty in recovering."
"You think," said Bertha, "that nothing could ever touch you again,—nothing?"
"Think!" was the response; "my safety lies in the fact that I do not think of it at all. If I were twenty I might do so, and everything would be different. Life is very short. It is not long enough to run risks in. I shall not trifle with what is left to me."
"Oh," cried Bertha, "how calm you are—how calm you are!"
"Yes," she answered, "I am calm now."
But she put her hands up to her face again for an instant, and her eyelashes were wet when she withdrew them.
"It was a horribly dangerous thing," she said, brokenly. "There were so many temptations; the temptation to find excitement in avenging myself on others was strongest of all. I suppose it is the natural savage impulse. There were times when I longed to be cruel. And then I began to think—and there seemed so much suffering in life—and everything seemed so pitiful. And I could not bear the thought of it." And she ended with the sob of a child.
"It is very womanish to cry," she whispered, "and I did not mean to do it, but—you look at me so." And she laid her cheek against the cushioned back of her chair, and, for a little while, was more pathetic in her silence than she could have been in any words she might have uttered. It was true that Bertha had looked at her. There were no tears in her own eyes. Her feeling was one of obstinate resistance to all emotion in herself; but she did not resent her friend's; on the contrary, she felt a strange enjoyment of it.
"Don't stop crying because I am here," she said. "I like to see you do it."