rial 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.

I took them in my hands, with the same feeling that I would have done a
tress of Mary's hair, or a fragment that she had handled. I think Miss
Axtell divined this feeling; for she cautiously opened the door leading
into her brother's room, and finding that he was not there, she bade me
"come and see." It was Mary's portrait that once more I looked upon;
framed in a wreath of the trailing-arbutus, it was hanging just where he
could look at it at night, as I my strange tower-key.

We went back. Miss Axtell closed the sash; she was looking weary and
pale. I was afraid she would suffer harm from the continued recital. She
said "No," to my fear,--that "it must all be spoken now, once, and that
forever,"--and I listened unto the story's end.

"One year had passed since Alice's death before Abraham's coming.
Another had almost fled before the eventful time when I began to feel
the weight of my cross. I know not how it came to Abraham's knowledge
that Bernard McKey felt in his soul my presence. I only know that
he came home one night, with a storm of rage whitening his lips and
furrowing his forehead. He came up here, where I was sitting. I had
watched his figure coming through tree-openings from Doctor Percival's
house, and mingled with the memories of the fair young girl whom I had
seen dead by lightning were fears for Mary Percival. For several days
she had been ill, and I knew that Abraham felt anxious; therefore I did
not wonder at his hasty comi