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 a better
time.' 'What IS it you have to tell me?' I asked. 'The Secret that
your cruel husb