im again:
he left the following day.

"You remember that I heard a rustling in the shrubbery, when Bernard
fled from the office. It was my mother, watching me. She had seen and
heard sufficient to convince her of what had been done. Mothers are
endowed with wonderful intuitive perception. Abraham had been her one
love from his childhood. Now came a strife in her nature. Bernard McKey
had wronged Abraham, had taken the light out of his life, and a great
longing for his punishment came up. How should it be effected? She
believed that open judgment would awaken resistance in me,--that I would
stand beside him then, in the face of all the world, and recompense him
for his punishment,--I, an Axtell, her daughter. So she came to me with
a compromise. She told me that she had heard what had been said,--that
she knew the deed, had seen the cup,--that Abraham, knowing the act,
would never forgive it, though done, as she acknowledged, in error;
and she, my mother, to save the family, made conditions. Her knowledge
should remain hers only, if Bernard McKey should remain such as he now
was to me,--never to be more.

"'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."