“She asked me in return, if I should not be afraid of a man who had shut me up in a mad-house, and who would shut me up again, if he could?  I said, ’Are you afraid still?  Surely you would not be here if you were afraid now?’ ‘No,’ she said, ’I am not afraid now.’  I asked why not.  She suddenly bent forward into the boat-house, and said, ‘Can’t you guess why?’ I shook my head.  ’Look at me,’ she went on.  I told her I was grieved to see that she looked very sorrowful and very ill.  She smiled for the first time.  ‘Ill?’ she repeated; ’I’m dying.  You know why I’m not afraid of him now.  Do you think I shall meet your mother in heaven?  Will she forgive me if I do?’ I was so shocked and so startled, that I could make no reply.  ‘I have been thinking of it,’ she went on, ’all the time I have been in hiding from your husband, all the time I lay ill.  My thoughts have driven me here—­I want to make atonement—­I want to undo all I can of the harm I once did.’  I begged her as earnestly as I could to tell me what she meant.  She still looked at me with fixed vacant eyes.  ’Shall I undo the harm?’ she said to herself doubtfully.  ’You have friends to take your part.  If you know his Secret, he will be afraid of you, he won’t dare use you as he used me.  He must treat you mercifully for his own sake, if he is afraid of you and your friends.  And if he treats you mercifully, and if I can say it was my doing——­’ I listened eagerly for more, but she stopped at those words.”

“You tried to make her go on?”

“I tried, but she only drew herself away from me again, and leaned her face and arms against the side of the boat-house.  ‘Oh!’ I heard her say, with a dreadful, distracted tenderness in her voice, ’oh! if I could only be buried with your mother!  If I could only wake at her side, when the angel’s trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!’—­Marian!  I trembled from head to foot—­it was horrible to hear her.  ’But there is no hope of that,’ she said, moving a little, so as to look at me again, ’no hope for a poor stranger like me.  I shall not rest under the marble cross that I washed with my own hands, and made so white and pure for her sake.  Oh no! oh no!  God’s mercy, not man’s, will take me to her, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.’  She spoke those words quietly and sorrowfully, with a heavy, hopeless sigh, and then waited a little.  Her face was confused and troubled, she seemed to be thinking, or trying to think.  ’What was it I said just now?’ she asked after a while.  ’When your mother is in my mind, everything else goes out of it.  What was I saying? what was I saying?’ I reminded the poor creature, as kindly and delicately as I could.  ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ she said, still in a vacant, perplexed manner.  ’You are helpless with your wicked husband.  Yes.  And I must do what I have come to do here—­I must make it up to you for having been afraid to speak out at