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 boathouse. ‘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