What glad visitors they were, Aaron and Sophie! and what a surprise to them to see Miss Axtell there!  I took off her wrappings, drew an easy-chair, made her sit in it, and she actually looked quite comfortable, outside of the solemn old house.  “She had endured the journey well,” she said.  Abraham was so anxious that she should come that she would not refuse his request.  “Abraham has forgiven me,” she whispered, as I bent over her to adjust some stray folds,—­“forgiven me for all my years of silent deceit.”

I shook my head a little at the word; speak I could not, for the minister’s wife was not deaf.

Aaron called her away a moment later.

“It was deceit, Miss Percival,” Miss Axtell said, so soon as she found our two selves alone.  “I could not well avoid it; if I were tried again, I might repeat the sin; but, thank Heaven, two such trials never come into a single life.  I sometimes wish Bernard were not at sea, that he were here to know my release and his forgiveness; it will be so sweet to feel that no longer I have the sin to bear of concealing his wrong.”

I knew from this that Miss Axtell did not know of Mr. McKey’s presence in the house; but she ought to know.  What if a sound from his voice should chance to come down the passage-way, as I often had heard it?  I watched the doors painfully, to see that not one was left open a hair’s-breadth, until the time Miss Axtell went up to her own room.  Talking rapidly, giving her no time to speak, I went on with her.  Safely ignorant, I had her at last where ears of mortals could not intrude.  Then I said,—­

“We all of us are become wonderful story-tellers.  Now it comes to pass that I have a little story to tell; my time is come at last”; and, watching every muscle of her face, and all the little veins of feeling that I had learned so well, I began.

Carefully I let in the light, until, without a shock, Miss Axtell learned that the room below contained Bernard McKey.

“They did not understand me,” she said, “or they would not have brought me here thus.”

After a long, long lull, Miss Axtell thanked me for telling her alone, where no one else could see how the knowledge played around her heart.  Dear Miss Axtell, sitting there, in my father’s house, only last March, with a holy joy stealing up, in spite of her endeavor to hide it from my eyes even, and suffusing her white face with warm, rosy tints, dear Miss Axtell, I hoped your day-dawn drawing near.

Miss Axtell said “she hated to have other people see her feel”; she asked “would I manage it for her, that no one should be nigh when she met Mr. McKey?”

It was that very evening that papa, calling Sophie and me into his room, told us a little of the former history of the people in his house.

“I want you to help me, children,” he said; “ladies manage such things better than we men know how to.”

I said, close to papa’s astonished hearing, “I know all about it; just let me take care of this mission”; and he appointed me diplomate on the occasion.