and tried to hide the sustenance it
gave. I saw that my mother's eyes were often upon me,--that she was
trying to follow my joy to its source. One day,--it was the very one
before his coming,--she came suddenly upon me when I was wrapt in my
mantle of exquisite consciousness. I had gone down to the river: you
know it runs at the foot of the place. Tired of stirring up dry, dead
leaves, I leaned against a tree,--one arm was around it,--and with my
eyes traversing the blue of the sky, on and on, in quick, constant,
flashing journeys, like fixed heat-lightning, I suddenly became
conscious of a blue upon the earth, orbed in my mother's cool eyes. I
don't know how I came out of the sky. She said only, 'Your thoughts
harmonize with the season'; but I knew she meant much more. It was long
since she had wandered so far from the house; but of late she had had
my joy to trace,--my mother, to whom I could not intrust it, in all of
whose nature it had no place, whose spirit mine was not formed to call
out echoes from. The result of her walk to the river was a subsequent
day of prostration and a nervous headache. All the morning of that
November day I sat beside her in the darkened room. I bathed her head,
until she said there was _too_ much life in my hands, and sent for
Abraham. Thus my time of release came."

A quick, involuntary smile crossed Miss Axtell's face at the memory of
her first sight of Mr. McKey. I watched her now. She changed the style
of her narration, taking it on quickly, in nervous periods, with
electric pauses, which she did not fill as formerly.

"We met in the tower, happily without discovery. I told him of my
mother's knowledge, showed him the notice of his (as I had thought)
death.

"'It is my cousin,' he said carelessly,--adding, with a sigh, 'poor
fellow! he was to have married soon.'

"I gave him the letter, the key of all my agony.

"'I remember when he wrote this,' he went on, as carelessly as if his
words had all been known to me. 'You did not see him, perhaps; he
was with me the first time I came to Redleaf,--was here the night he
describes.'

"It was so strange that he did not ask where I obtained the letter! but
he did not. He gave me an epitome of his cousin's life and death. The
two were named after an uncle; each had received the baptismal sign ere
it was known that the other received the name; in after-time the Herbert
was added to one.

"We sat in the window of the tower all through t