Nest revived during the warm summer weather. Edward came to see her, and staid the allotted quarter of an hour; but he dared not look her in the face. She was indeed a cripple: one leg was much shorter than the other, and she halted on a crutch. Her face, formerly so brilliant in color, was wan and pale with suffering: the bright roses were gone, never to return. Her large eyes were sunk deep down in their hollow, cavernous sockets: but the light was in them still, when Edward came. Her mother dreaded her returning strength--dreaded, yet desired it; for the heavy burden of her secret was most oppressive at times, and she thought Edward was beginning to weary of his enforced attentions. One October evening she told her the truth. She even compelled her rebellious heart to take the cold, reasoning side of the question; and she told her child that her disabled frame was a disqualification for ever becoming a farmer's wife. She spoke hardly, because her inner agony and sympathy was such, she dared not trust herself to express the feelings that were rending her. But Nest turned away from cold reason; she revolted from her mother; she revolted from the world. She bound her sorrow tight up in her breast, to corrode and fester there. Night after night, her mother heard her cries and moans--more pitiful, by far, than those wrung from her by bodily pain a year before; and, night after night, if her mother spoke to soothe, she proudly denied the existence of any pain but what was physical, and consequent upon her accident. "If she would but open her sore heart to me--to me, her mother," Eleanor wailed forth in prayer to God, "I would be content. Once it was enough to have my Nest all my own. Then came love, and I knew it would never be as before; and then I thought the grief I felt, when Edward spoke to me, was as sharp a sorrow as could be; but this present grief, Oh Lord, my God, is worst of all; and Thou only, Thou canst help!"