"But you have not, for a long time at least, known any very acute sorrow?"
"No," said Fleda, "but that is not necessary. There is a gentle kind of discipline which does its work, I think, more surely."
"Thank God for gentle discipline!" said Mr. Olmney; "if you do not know what those griefs are that break down mind and body together."
"I am not unthankful, I hope, for anything," said Fleda, gently; "but I have been apt to think that, after a crushing sorrow, the mind may rise up again, but that a long-continued though much lesser pressure in time breaks the spring."
He looked at her again with a mixture of incredulous and tender interest, but her face did not belie her words, strange as they sounded from so young and in general so bright-seeming a creature.
"There shall no evil happen to the just," he said, presently, and with great sympathy.
Fleda flashed a look of gratitude at him it was no more, for she felt her eyes watering, and turned them away.
"You have not, I trust, heard any bad news?"
"No, Sir not at all."
"I beg pardon for asking, but Mrs. Rossitur seemed to be in less good spirits than usual." He had some reason to say so, having found her in a violent fit of weeping.