“We were come to the church on our way.  I stayed my steps, and thought of the letter that Abraham had given me; it came up for the first time since I knew of Mary’s death.  But I did not allude to it.  I could not acknowledge, even to him, that I knew another had received the words that should have been spoken only to me; and sincerely I told him that he must go away, at once and for always,—­that the deed his hand had unknowingly done must be borne in swift, solemn current through his life,—­that he must live beside it until it reached the ocean to come:  it could do no good to reveal it; it could arouse only new misery; it seemed better that it should be written on marble and in memory that ‘God took her.’

“He took up the silence that came after my words, and filled it with an echoing question:—­

“’If I go out, and bear this deed, as you say bear it, in silence and in suffering, will you,—­you, to whom God has given a good inheritance, who know not the rush and roar of any evil in your soul, whose spring rises far back in ancestral natures,—­will you stand between me and all this that I must bear?  Will you be my rock, set here, in this village?  May I come back at times, and tell you how I endure?  If you will promise me this, I will go.’

“Why should he come to me? why not to the other one, to whom he told of Alice’s death two years ago?  He did not know that pride was the ever vernal sin of my race, that I had it to battle with.  But I conquered, and promised I would help him, since it was all I had to do.  A few more words were spoken; he was to write to me when he would come; and we parted, there, at the old church-door,—­he promising to live, to try and make atonement for his sin,—­I to hold his deed in keeping, alone of all the world, save Chloe, and in her I had trust.  I did not see him again:  he left the following day.

“You remember that I heard a rustling in the shrubbery, when Bernard fled from the office.  It was my mother, watching me.  She had seen and heard sufficient to convince her of what had been done.  Mothers are endowed with wonderful intuitive perception.  Abraham had been her one love from his childhood.  Now came a strife in her nature.  Bernard McKey had wronged Abraham, had taken the light out of his life, and a great longing for his punishment came up.  How should it be effected?  She believed that open judgment would awaken resistance in me,—­that I would stand beside him then, in the face of all the world, and recompense him for his punishment,—­I, an Axtell, her daughter.  So she came to me with a compromise.  She told me that she had heard what had been said,—­that she knew the deed, had seen the cup,—­that Abraham, knowing the act, would never forgive it, though done, as she acknowledged, in error; and she, my mother, to save the family, made conditions.  Her knowledge should remain hers only, if Bernard McKey should remain such as he now was to me,—­never to be more.