seeming.  I took it in as the hungry do food, and tried to hide the sustenance it gave.  I saw that my mother’s eyes were often upon me,—­that she was trying to follow my joy to its source.  One day,—­it was the very one before his coming,—­she came suddenly upon me when I was wrapt in my mantle of exquisite consciousness.  I had gone down to the river:  you know it runs at the foot of the place.  Tired of stirring up dry, dead leaves, I leaned against a tree,—­one arm was around it,—­and with my eyes traversing the blue of the sky, on and on, in quick, constant, flashing journeys, like fixed heat-lightning, I suddenly became conscious of a blue upon the earth, orbed in my mother’s cool eyes.  I don’t know how I came out of the sky.  She said only, ’Your thoughts harmonize with the season’; but I knew she meant much more.  It was long since she had wandered so far from the house; but of late she had had my joy to trace,—­my mother, to whom I could not intrust it, in all of whose nature it had no place, whose spirit mine was not formed to call out echoes from.  The result of her walk to the river was a subsequent day of prostration and a nervous headache.  All the morning of that November day I sat beside her in the darkened room.  I bathed her head, until she said there was too much life in my hands, and sent for Abraham.  Thus my time of release came.”

A quick, involuntary smile crossed Miss Axtell’s face at the memory of her first sight of Mr. McKey.  I watched her now.  She changed the style of her narration, taking it on quickly, in nervous periods, with electric pauses, which she did not fill as formerly.

“We met in the tower, happily without discovery.  I told him of my mother’s knowledge, showed him the notice of his (as I had thought) death.

“‘It is my cousin,’ he said carelessly,—­adding, with a sigh, ’poor fellow! he was to have married soon.’

“I gave him the letter, the key of all my agony.

“‘I remember when he wrote this,’ he went on, as carelessly as if his words had all been known to me.  ’You did not see him, perhaps; he was with me the first time I came to Redleaf,—­was here the night he describes.’

“It was so strange that he did not ask where I obtained the letter! but he did not.  He gave me an epitome of his cousin’s life and death.  The two were named after an uncle; each had received the baptismal sign ere it was known that the other received the name; in after-time the Herbert was added to one.

“We sat in the window of the tower all through the 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.