“I would rather find it.”
“When you can’t do what you would, you must do the next best thing, my child.”
“What is that, father?”
“Do without it.”
The tea bell rang then, and Flora wiped away her tears, and tried to reconcile herself to the loss of the thimble. She was very sad and unhappy, for she felt that it had been lost by her own carelessness.
The feeling that we have done wrong is far more painful than the consequences which follow that wrong. Many good and true men have been happy while their bodies were burning at the stake, or while they were shut up in prison.
All the family sat down at the tea table except Mr. Lee, and he went up stairs. He was absent fifteen or twenty minutes, and when he came back he looked very sad, as though something unpleasant had happened.
But no one asked him any questions, and he did not say any thing to inform the rest of the party what had occurred during his absence.
After tea, the family gathered around the cheerful fire in the sitting room, as they always did during the long winter evenings. Mary was busy with a great book, which was full of pictures. Flora had a little story book in her hand, but she did not read it. She felt so badly about the loss of her thimble that she could not read.
Mrs. Lee was sewing, and Mr. Lee was looking over the newspaper which David White had brought in the afternoon.