and cryin' without tears.

"Honey, if you're done a wrong to a livin' person, you needn't set
down and grieve over it. You can go right to the person and make it
right or try to make it right. But when the one you've wronged is
dead, and the grave lies between you, that's the sort o' grief that
breaks hearts and makes people lose their minds. And that was what
Mary Andrews had to bear when she opened the door o' that old cabin
and saw into Harvey's nature, and felt that she had misjudged and
condemned him.

"I couldn't do anything for a long time, but jest sit by her and
listen while she called Harvey back from the dead, and called on God
to forgive her, and blamed herself for all that had ever gone wrong
between 'em. But at last she wore herself out and had to stop, and
says I, 'Mary, I don't know what's passed between you and Harvey--'
And she broke in, and says she:

"'No! no! you don't know, and nobody on this earth knows what I've
been through. I used to feel like I was in an iron cage that got
smaller and smaller every day, and I knew the day was comin' when it
would shut in on me and crush me. But I wouldn't give in to Harvey, I
wouldn't let him have his own way, and I fought him and hated him and
despised him; and now I see he couldn't help it, and I feel like I'd
been strikin' a crippled child.'

"A crippled child! That was jest what pore Harvey was; but I knew it
wasn't right for Mary to take all the blame on herself, and says I:

"'Mary, if Harvey could keep other people from knowin' what he was,
couldn't he have kept you from knowin' it, too? If he was free-handed
to other people, what was to hinder him from bein' the same way to
you?' Says I, 'If there's any blame in this matter it belongs as much
to Harvey as it does to you. When you look at that old cabin,' says I,
'you can't have any hard feelin's toward pore Harvey. You've forgiven
him, and now,' says I, 'there's jest one more person you've got to
forgive, and that's yourself,' says I. 'It's jest as wrong to be too
hard on yourself as it is to be too hard on other folks.'

"I never had thought o' that before, child, but I've thought of it
many a time since and I know it's true. It ain't often you find a
human bein' that's too hard on himself. Most of us is jest the other
way. But Mary was one of that kind. I could see a change come over
her face while I was talkin', and I've always believed them words was
put in my mouth to give Mary the comfort