The last words caught a little bitter echo in the woman’s heart. She silenced it. She took Julia by the shoulders, who had slid to the floor, half kneeling, half sitting, the tears slipping down her cheeks. “Even if you love him,” she cried, “isn’t he human? Can’t you forgive him that much? He will forgive you—men forgive more in women!” Julia’s hands held the folds of her gown. “But what can I do?” she implored. She hung on the other’s words with a passionate dependence. Florence, with an impulse, took the face between her hands. “Be sure you want him more than anything else,” she murmured. The head inclined faintly. The wide eyes still held hers with their piteous stare and falling tears. “Go to him,” Florence whispered. She felt the girl trembling. “When?” “Now!” Julia sobbed. “My mother!” “That will come afterward. Never mind any of the rest of us—what we do and say. It doesn’t matter. Only think of him! Promise me you won’t leave him until you have made it right!” “Are you sure I can?” the girl whispered, with such a face of hope and fear, such joy struggling with tears, that Florence, remembering in what hard ways even the greatest love may lead, leaned down and kissed her. “Quite sure,” she said. Julia drew yet closer. “Are you _sure_ he—he loves me?” The last words were a breath. Florence drew back coldly. “You must go _now_,” she said. Then seeing Julia shrink at her strange, dry voice, she added, “Do you think he would tell that to _me_?”—at what cost she herself did not measure. But she did not realize that she was in the midst of her crisis. She was too much in it to look back or forward. She saw only outward actions, the minute present. When she spoke with the nurse at the door of the sick-room her voice was even matter-of-fact. The white-capped woman came out. Florence waited until she went into another room farther down the hall. Then she almost pushed Julia in. “No one will come,” she murmured as she closed the door after her. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIII THAIR CONGRATULATES FLORENCE sat down in the window-seat in the dusky hall. The diamond panes of milky glass let in a misty light. She drew the drapery of the dark curtains around her, the better to insure against interruption. The house was silent at that long hour of the afternoon when all the day’s processes seem to stand still, and heart and brain alike grow torpid. She waited, as still as her still surroundings, a piece with the dull curtain, until an opening door should reanimate her to living.