How should it be effected? She
believed that open judgment would awaken resistance in me,--that I would
stand beside him then, in the face of all the world, and recompense him
for his punishment,--I, an Axtell, her daughter. So she came to me with
a compromise. She told me that she had heard what had been said,--that
she knew the deed, had seen the cup,--that Abraham, knowing the act,
would never forgive it, though done, as she acknowledged, in error;
and she, my mother, to save the family, made conditions. Her knowledge
should remain hers only, if Bernard McKey should remain such as he now
was to me,--never to be more.
"'An easy condition,' I thought, 'since the letter Abraham gave'; and I
said the two words to my mother,--
"'I promise.'
"'My daughter,' was her only answer; and she touched her child's
forehead with two burning lips, and went away to watch Abraham through
the night,--watch him tread the dark way, without Mary.
"Where now was the Mountain-Pine? higher than the Arbutus?
"Our mother had her trial.
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