“It might have been forever thus, but Abraham came home.  He is my brother, you know.  If he made me suffer, he has been made to suffer with me.  Bernard McKey was Doctor Percival’s favorite.  He made him his friend, and was everything to him that friend could be.  I cannot tell you my story without mention of my brother, he has been so woven into every part of it.  An unaccountable fancy for the study of medicine developed itself in his erratic nature soon after he came home; and he relinquished his brilliant prospects and devoted himself to the little white office near Doctor Percival’s house, with Bernard McKey for his hourly companion.  The two had scarce a thought in common:  one was impulsive, prone to throw himself on the stream of circumstance, to waft with the wind, and blossom with the spring; the other was the great mountain-pine, distilling the same aroma in all atmospheres, extending fibrous roots against Nature’s granite, whenceever it comes up.  How could the two harmonize?  They could not, and a time of trial came.  We knew, before it came, why Doctor Percival’s little white office held Abraham so many hours in the day.  It was because the Mountain-Pine found in the moss of Redleaf the sweet Trailing-Arbutus.”

She asked me if I knew the flower; and when I answered her with my words of love of it, she said, “she had always thought it was one of Eden’s own bits of blossomry, that, missing man from the hallowed grounds, crept out to know his fate, and, finding him so forlornly unblest, had sacrificed its emerald leaves, left in the Garden, and, creeping into mosses, lived, waiting for man’s redemption.  We used to call Mary ‘The Arbutus,’ and it was pleasant to see the great rough branches of Abraham’s nature drooping down, more and more, toward the pink-and-white pale flower that looked into the sky, from a level as lofty as the Pine’s highest crown.  Abraham goes out to search for the type of Mary every spring”; and rising, she brought to me the waxen buds that were yet unopened.

I took them in my hands, with the same feeling that I would have done a tress of Mary’s hair, or a fragment that she had handled.  I think Miss Axtell divined this feeling; for she cautiously opened the door leading into her brother’s room, and finding that he was not there, she bade me “come and see.”  It was Mary’s portrait that once more I looked upon; framed in a wreath of the trailing-arbutus, it was hanging just where he could look at it at night, as I my strange tower-key.

We went back.  Miss Axtell closed the sash; she was looking weary and pale.  I was afraid she would suffer harm from the continued recital.  She said “No,” to my fear,—­that “it must all be spoken now, once, and that forever,”—­and I listened unto the story’s end.