The house, when finally it loomed upon them, with its irregular roofs topped by curious square turrets, with its tremendous ground floor rambling away in wings on every side, with its deep upper and lower verandas, looked out upon by a multitude of long French windows, seemed too large, too strangely imposing for a structure of wood. But whatever of original ugliness had been there was hidden now under a splendid tapestry of vines, and Flora, looking up at the rose and honeysuckle that panoplied its front, felt her throat swell for sheer delight.
For a moment after they had left the carriage they stood together in the porte-cochère, looking around them. Then half wistfully, half humorously, Mrs. Herrick turned to Flora. "I do hope you won't want to buy it!"
"Oh, I'm afraid I shall," Flora murmured, "that is, if--" She left her sentence hanging, as one who would have said "if I come out of this alive," and Mrs. Herrick, with a quick start of protection, laid her hand on Flora's arm.
"If you must," she said lightly, "if you do buy it, then at least I shall know it is in good hands."
Flora gave her a look of gratitude, not so much for the slight kindness of her words as for the great kindness of her attitude in thus so readily resuming the first assumption on which her presence there had been invited. That was the house itself.
It was plain to Flora from the moment she set foot over the threshold that the house was to be no mean ally of theirs, but Mrs. Herrick was making it help them doubly in their hard interval of waiting. Alone together with unspoken, unspeakable things between them--things that for mere decency or honor could not be uttered--with nothing but these to think of, nothing but each other to look at, they must yet, in sheer desperation and suspense, have inevitably burst out with question or confession, had not the great house been there to interpose its personality. And the way Mrs. Herrick was making the most of that! The way immediately, even before she had shown anything, she began to revivify the spirit of the place, as the two women stood with their hats not yet off in the room that was to be Flora's, talking and looking out upon the lawn!
With her silences, with her expressive self as well as with her words, Mrs. Herrick was reanimating it all the while they lunched and rested, still in the upper-rooms overlooking the garden. And later, when they made the tour of the house, she began unwinding from her memory incidents of its early beginnings, pieces of its intimate, personal history, as one would make a friend familiar to another friend. And these past histories and the rooms themselves were leading Flora away out of her anxious self, were soothing her prying apprehensions, were giving her a detachment in the present, till what she so anticipated lay quiescent at the back of her brain.