“He asked the style of question which monosyllables can never answer, to which responding, one has to offer somewhat of herself; and all the time of that sombre autumn, there grew from out the chasm of the lightning-stroke luxuriant foliage.  I gave it all the resistance of my nature, yet I knew, as the consumptive knows, that I should be conquered by my conqueror.  It was only the old story of the captive polishing chains to wear them away; and yet Mr. McKey was simply very civil and intentionally kind, where he might have been courteously indifferent.  Abraham was away when Bernard McKey came to Redleaf.  For more than twelve months this terrible something had been working its power into my soul.  Yet we were not lovers,”—­and Miss Axtell made the pronunciamiento as if she held the race mentioned in utmost veneration.  “Day by day brought to me new reasons why Bernard McKey must be unto me only a medical student in Doctor Percival’s office, and the stars sealed all that the day had done; whilst no night of sky was without a wandering comet, whereon was inscribed, in letters that flashed every way, the sentence that came with the lightning-stroke; even storms drowned it not; winter’s cold did not freeze it.  Verily, little friend, I know that God had put it into Creation for me, and yet there seemed His own law written against it”; and Miss Axtell’s tones grew very soft and tremulously low, as she said,—­

“Mr. McKey had faults that could not, existing in action, make any woman happy:  do you think happiness was meant for woman?”

She waited my answer in the same way that she had done when she was ill and asked if I liked bitters concealed.  She waited as long without reply.  The pause grew oppressive, and I spanned it by an assurance of individual possessive happiness.

“Anemones never know which way the wind blows, until it comes down close to the ground,” she said; “but souls which are on bleak mountain-summits must watch whirlwinds, poised in space, and note their airy march.  So I saw, clearly cut into the rock of the future, my own face, with all the lines and carvings wrought into it that the life of Bernard McKey would chisel out, and I only waited.  I might have waited on forever, for Mr. McKey had not cast one pebbly word that must send up wavy ripples from deep spirit-waters; he only wandered, as any other might have done, upon the shore of my life, along its quiet, dewy sands, above its chalk-cliffs, and by the side of its green, sloping shores.  He never questioned why rose and fell the waves; he never went down where ’tide, the moon-slave, sleeps,’ to find the foundations of my heart’s mainland.  I had only seen him standing at times, as one sees a person upon a ship’s deck, peering off over Earth’s blue ocean-cheek, simply in mute, solemn wonder at what may be beyond, without one wish to speed the ship on.