She put her hands together like a child, and turned her mild eyes to her sister’s with more than a child’s passion of entreaty in them. How hard it is to fathom the mysteries of a mind thus veiled by heavy misadventure and injury, cut off in fact from the record of its own life! Mary had been roused to think, she had been startled out of her calm, but all fruitlessly, only enough to make her brain swim, and fill her being with confusion and mental pain. She clung to the quiet which was in her secluded home. She felt when she entered it again as if she had escaped from all that could shake and startle her. The strange commotion that had arisen within her when Mar rose in the rustic assembly, when he spoke with a voice which was familiar, yet unfamiliar, full of echoes of dead voices, and which struck to her very heart, she knew not how, had been like a terrible storm to Mary. She could not find her way among the vague thinkings that were all stirred up within her--broken recollections, suggestions, an indistinct new world which was at the same time old. A little more and she might have caught the clue, found the key, touched the spring that would bring light upon the darkness. But she was not capable of the effort, and the stir of the roused thoughts, like the wings of a crowd of frightened birds disturbed by a strange light, had deafened and dazed her. “Don’t make me think and think:” it was the most pathetic appeal of weakness. Agnes could not resist that tremulous call. She went to her sister and kissed her tenderly. “I will not trouble you more. I will never trouble you more,” she said with tears. It seemed to be giving up Mar’s cause--but Mar was young and had all the world before him. Even if it never came to him, that recognition from his mother, which the boy who did not know his mother could have at the most but a visionary desire for--it could not harm him much; it would interfere with none of his rights nor with his personal happiness. But poor Mary’s calm and subdued life might be shattered if she were pushed too far. The delusions in which she lived, which sufficed for her, might be destroyed--her quiet banished without any greater good being attained. Agnes gave up a cherished hope when she gave her sister that kiss. She would disturb her no more. Better that she should live and die in this seclusion that suited her, and please herself with a number of innocent things, and do her gentle charities, and smile and be happy in her own subdued way, than forced to search again in the dimness of her confused being, and to wreck her peace--probably for nothing. Agnes gave up her hopes as she yielded in the weariness of that summer evening. She knew as little that events were occurring that very day which might make it entirely unimportant whether Mary ever recovered her complete understanding or not, as she did that a vague light had already been established in Mary’s confused mind, which would not be quenched again. She gave up