But it was there. And now and then, when in a gust of wind the lights and shadows danced on the dim, polished floors, it stirred; and at the sound of wheels on the drive below it leaped, and all her fears again were in her face. At such moments the two women did look deeply at each other, and the suspense, the premonition, hovered in Mrs. Herrick's eyes. It was as unconscious, as involuntary, as Flora's start at the swinging of a door; but no question crossed her lips. She let the matter as severely alone as if it had been a jewel not her own. Yet, it came to Flora all at once that here, for the first time, she was with one to whom she could have revealed the sapphire on her neck and yet remain unchallenged.
"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."