before, but now I felt a longing to
go away. Earth seemed so drear,--mother was sick,--Abraham unhappy,--my
father deep in the perplexing cares of his profession, mostly from
home,--Mrs. Percival was dying,--the year was passing away,--and I, too,
would be going; and as I went out of the house to go home, I remembered
the day wherein I had waited in the viny arbor for Mary to awaken from
sleep, how I had gone down to the sea to waken myself to a light that
burned before it blessed. Since then I had avoided the place, barred
with so many prison-wires. Now I felt a longing to go into it. The
leaves were frost-bitten. I sympathized with them. Autumn winds went
sighing over their misfortunes; spirit-winds blew past me, on their way
to and from the land that is and the land that is not to us. The arbor
was dear with a newborn love. I went out to greet it, as one might greet
a ship sailing the same great ocean, though bound to a different port.
There was a something in that old vine-clad arbor that was in me. I felt
its shadows coming out to meet me. They chilled a little, but I went in.
I looked at the little white office, across the yard, in the corner. I
thought of the face that came out that day to see me,--the face that
drank up my heart in one long draught, begun across Alice dead, finished
when I read that letter. The cup of my heart was empty,--_so empty_ now!
I looked down into it; it was fringed with stalactites, crystallized
from the poison of the glass. Oh! what did I see there? A dead, dead
crater, aching for the very fire that made it what it was, crying out of
its fierce void for fiery fusion. Why did our God make us so,--us, who
love, knowing we should not? I knew from the beginning that Bernard
McKey ought not to be cared for by me; but could I help it? Now the veil
of death, I believed, hung between, and the cup of my heart might be
embalmed: the last change, I thought, had come to it, and left it as I
that day found.

"Chloe came around the corner, throwing her apron over her head. She
looked up and down the way, as if in search of some one, went down the
walk to the gate, looked as I had once seen her do at our house, taking
it window by window, and finding no one, (the day seemed deserted,) she
was walking back. I called to her from the arbor.

"'I was just looking for you, Miss Lettie. I've got a letter here.
Mistress is too sick to read it for me, and Master's away. Would you?'

"It was addressed to