he short November
afternoon. We saw Chloe come into the church-yard; she came to take up
some roses that had blossomed in summer beside Mary's grave. We heard
her knife moving about in the pebbly soil, and watched her going home.
She was the only comer. In November, people never visit such places,
save from necessity.

"Mr. McKey and I had discovered the passage leading from church to
tower. Mary was with us then. There was a romance in keeping the secret,
poetry in the knowledge that we three were sole proprietors; one was
gone,--now it became only ours.

"How came _you_ to know of it?" she suddenly asked.

Questioned thus, I twined my story in with hers, she listening in a rapt
way, peculiarly her own. I told her of my prisonment on the day of her
visit. I confessed entirely, up to the point she had narrated. When I
ended, she said,--

"You have kept this secret twenty-five days; mine has been mine
eighteen years. Mr. McKey has wandered in the time over the world of
civilization, coming here at every return, making only day-visits,
wandering up and down familiar places, meeting people whom he knew, but
who never saw him through his disguises. He met my mother twice; even
her quick eyes had no ray of suspicion in them.

"Four years ago we went to Europe: father's health demanded it. There,
by accident, I met Mr. McKey. Fourteen years had so changed him from
the medical student in Doctor Percival's office, that, although without
disguise, neither mother nor Abraham recognized him. It was in England
that father died,--there that we met Mr. McKey. It was he who, coming as
a stranger, proved our best friend, whom mother and Abraham called Mr.
Herbert. It was his hand lifted up for the last time my father's head
just before he died. It was he who went to and fro making all needful
arrangements for father's burial. At last we prepared to leave. He came
to the steamer to say parting words. Mother and Abraham, with tearful
eyes, thanking him for his past kindness, begged, should he ever come to
America, a visit from him. When their farewells were ended, he looked
around for me. I was standing apart from them; the place where my feet
then were is to-day fathoms deep under iceberg-soil: it was upon the
Pacific's deck. I wonder if just there where I then stood it is as cold
as elsewhere,--if Ocean's self hath power to congeal the vitality of
spirit."

Miss Axtell paused one moment, as if answering the question to herself.