unsealed Hetty's lips.

"Love you!" she exclaimed in a piercing voice. "Love you! oh, Eben!" and
then she poured out, without reserves or disguises, the whole story
of her convictions, her decision, and her flight. Her husband did not
interrupt her by word or gesture. As she proceeded with her narrative,
he slowly withdrew his eyes from her face, and fixed them on the floor.
It was harder for her to speak when he thus looked away from her.
Timidly she said:

"Do not turn your eyes away from me, Eben. It makes me afraid. I cannot
tell you the rest, if you look so."

With an evident effort, he raised his eyes again, and again met her
earnest gaze. But it was only for a few seconds. Again his eyes drooped,
evaded hers, and rested on the floor. Again Hetty paused; and said still
more pleadingly:

"Please look at me, Eben. Indeed I can't talk to you if you do not."

Like one stung suddenly by some insupportable pain, he wrenched her
hands from his knees, sprang to his feet, and walked swiftly back and
forth. She remained kneeling by the chair, looking up at him with a most
piteous face. "Hetty," he exclaimed, "you must be patient with me. Try
and imagine what it is to have believed for ten years that you were
dead; to have mourned you as dead; to have spent ten whole years of
weary, comfortless days; and then to find suddenly that you have been
all this time living,--voluntarily hiding yourself from me; needlessly
torturing me! Why, Hetty! Hetty! you must have been mad. You must be mad
now, I think, to kneel there and tell me all these details so calmly,
and in such a matter-of-fact way. Do you realize what a monstrous thing
you have been doing?" And Dr. Eben's eyes blazed with a passionate
indignation, as he stopped short in his excited walk and looked down
upon Hetty. Then, in the next second, touched by the look on her
uplifted face, so noble, so pure, so benevolent, he forgot all his
resentment, all his perplexity, all his pain; and, stooping over her,
he lifted her from her knees, and, folding her close to his bosom,
exclaimed:

"Oh, my Hetty, my own; forgive me. I am the one that is mad. How can I
think of any thing except the joy of having found you again? No wonder
I thought at first we were both dead. Oh, my precious wife, is it
really you? Are you sure we are alive?" And he kissed her again and
again,--hair, brow, eyes, lips,--with a solemn rapture.

A great silence fell upon them: there seemed no more to