"'It is Bernard McKey; he has come to study medicine in papa's office; he came the night Alice died.'
"He was too near to permit of questioning more, and so I stood upon the seashore and saw my fate coming close.
"Mary simply said, 'Good evening,' to him, followed by the requisite introductory words that form the basis of acquaintance.
"'I think Miss Axtell and I scarcely need an introduction,' he said; nevertheless he looked the pleasure it had strewed into his field, and guarded it, as a careful husbandman would choicest seed.
"He asked the style of question which monosyllables can never answer, to which responding, one has to offer somewhat of herself; and all the time of that sombre autumn, there grew from out the chasm of the lightning-stroke luxuriant foliage. I gave it all the resistance of my nature, yet I knew, as the consumptive knows, that I should be conquered by my conqueror. It was only the old story of the captive polishing chains to wear them away; and yet Mr. McKey was simply very civil and intentionally kind, where he might have been courteously indifferent. Abraham was away when Bernard McKey came to Redleaf. For more than twelve months this terrible something had been working its power into my soul. Yet we were not lovers,"—and Miss Axtell made the pronunciamiento as if she held the race mentioned in utmost veneration. "Day by day brought to me new reasons why Bernard McKey must be unto me only a medical student in Doctor Percival's office, and the stars sealed all that the day had done; whilst no night of sky was without a wandering comet, whereon was inscribed, in letters that flashed every way, the sentence that came with the lightning-stroke; even storms drowned it not; winter's cold did not freeze it. Verily, little friend, I know that God had put it into Creation for me, and yet there seemed His own law written against it"; and Miss Axtell's tones grew very soft and tremulously low, as she said,—
"Mr. McKey had faults that could not, existing in action, make any woman happy: do you think happiness was meant for woman?"
She waited my answer in the same way that she had done when she was ill and asked if I liked bitters concealed. She waited as long without reply. The pause grew oppressive, and I spanned it by an assurance of individual possessive happiness.
"Anemones never know which way the wind blows, until it comes down close to the ground," she said; "but souls which are on bleak mountain-summits must watch whirlwinds, poised in space, and note their airy march. So I saw, clearly cut into the rock of the future, my own face, with all the lines and carvings wrought into it that the life of Bernard McKey would chisel out, and I only waited. I might have waited on forever, for Mr. McKey had not cast one pebbly word that must send up wavy ripples from deep spirit-waters; he only wandered, as any other might have done, upon the shore of my life, along its quiet, dewy sands, above its chalk-cliffs, and by the side of its green, sloping shores. He never questioned why rose and fell the waves; he never went down where 'tide, the moon-slave, sleeps,' to find the foundations of my heart's mainland. I had only seen him standing at times, as one sees a person upon a ship's deck, peering off over Earth's blue ocean-cheek, simply in mute, solemn wonder at what may be beyond, without one wish to speed the ship on.
"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.