"Perhaps--I do not know," said he, his eyes turning to it again as if to try what the effect was.
"My thoughts had gone back," said Fleda, "to a time a good while ago, when I was a child and stood here in summer weather--and I was thinking that the change in the landscape is something like that which years make in the mind."
"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?"