“‘An easy condition,’ I thought, ‘since the letter Abraham gave’; and I said the two words to my mother,—­

“‘I promise.’

“‘My daughter,’ was her only answer; and she touched her child’s forehead with two burning lips, and went away to watch Abraham through the night,—­watch him tread the dark way, without Mary.

“Where now was the Mountain-Pine? higher than the Arbutus?

“Our mother had her trial.  When she heard Abraham reproaching himself with having brought on a return of fever by refusing Mary’s wish, of having been the means of her death, I know her heart ached to say, ’It was not you, Abraham, it was Bernard McKey who killed her.’  But no, she did not; family pride towered above affection, and she was true to her promise, true to the last.  She died with the secret hers.

“Bernard McKey’s absence was much wondered at, although it began only one month earlier than the appointed time.  Doctor Percival mourned his going as if he had been his son; he spoke to me of it.  Mary was buried.  I remember your little face on her burial-day; it was bright, and unconscious of the sad scene”; and Miss Axtell now sought to look into it, but it was not to be seen.  I think she must have forgotten, at times, that it was to Mary’s sister that she was telling her story.  She waited a little, until I asked her to “tell me more.”

“The face of that Autumn grew rosy, wrinkled, and died upon Winter’s snowy bed; and yet I lived, and Abraham, and Bernard McKey perhaps,—­I knew not.  The year was nearly gone since Mary died, and no ray of knowledge had come from him.  Every day I re-read those words written to some fair woman-soul, until after so many readings they began to take root in my heart.  I found it out one day, and I began vigorously to tear them up.  It was on the evening of the same day that Abraham came home:  he had been away for several weeks.  He left, with intentional seeming, a paper where I should see it; he had read with almost careless eyes what mine fell upon, for he believed that Bernard McKey was forgotten by me; he had kindly forborne to mention his name, since that one night wherein all our misery grew.  I found there what I believed to be his death:  the name and age were his own; the place was nothing,—­he might be anywhere.  My mother saw it, and a gladness, yes, a gladness came into her face:  I watched its coming up.  She thought she might now tell Abraham; but no, I held her to the promise.  It had but two conditions:  mine was to be perpetual; hers must be so.

“After that I grew pitiful for the poor heart that must have been made sorrowful by these words that never more would come into it, and so I picked up the trembling little roots that had been cast out, put them back into the warm soil, and let them grow:  they might join hers now, for together they could twine around immortal bowers; and, as they grew, a great longing came up to go out and find this woman-soul who had drawn out such words from lips sealed forever.  But no chance happened:  no one came to our quiet village from the remote town in which she was when these words, that now were become mine, were penned.”