with me; and I forestalled it in furnishing this
house, Dr. Fenwick, and all these pretty things
will be sold to pay thos horrid tradesmen!—-
very hard! so hard!—just as I had got things
about me in the way I always said I would have
them if I could ever afford it. I always said I
would have my bedroom hung with muslin, like
dear Lady L.'s;—and the drawing-room in
geranium-coloured silk: so pretty. You have not
seen it: you would not know the house, Dr.
Fenwick. And just when all is finished, to be
taken away, and thrust into the grave. It is so
cruel!" And she began to weep. Her emotion
brought on a violent paroxysm, which, when she
recovered from it, had produced one of those
startling changes of mind that are sometime:
witnessed before death: changes whereby the
whole character of a life seems to undergo
solemn transformation. The hard will become
gentle, the proud meek, the frivolous earnest.
That awful moment when the things of earth
pass away like dissolving scenes, leaving death
visible on the back-ground by the glare that
shoots up in the last flicker of life's lamp.

And when she lifted her haggard face from my
shoulder, and heard my pitying, soothing voice,
it was not the grief of a trifler at the loss of
fondled toys that spoke in the falling lines of her
lip, in the woe of her pleading eyes.

"So this is death," she said. "I feel it
hurrying on. I must speak. I promised Mr.
C. that I would. Forgive me, can you—can
you? That letter—that letter to Lilian Ash-
leigh, I wrote it! Oh, do not look at me so
terribly; I never thought it could do such evil!
And am I not punished enough? I truly
believed, when I wrote, that Miss Ashleigh was
deceiving you, and once I was silly enough to
fancy that you might have liked me. But I had
another motive: I had been so poor all my life—
I had become rich unexpectedly; I set my heart
on this house—I had always fancied it and I
thought if I could prevent Miss Ashleigh marrying
you, and scare her and her mother from
coming back to L——, I could get the house.
And I did get it. What for? to die. I had
not been here a week before I got the hurt that
is killing me—a fall down the stairs—coming out
of this very room; the stairs had been polished.
If I had stayed in my old lodging, it would not
have happened. Oh, say you forgive me! Say,
say it, even if you do not feel you can! Say it!"
And the miserable woman grasped me by the
arm as Dr. Lloyd had grasped me.

I shaded my averted face with my hand; my
heart heaved with the agony of my supprest
passion. A wrong, however deep, only to myself,
I could have pardoned without effort; such a
wrong to Lilian,—-no! I could not say, "I forgive"

The dying wretch was, perhaps, more appalled
by my silence than she would have been by my
reproach. Her voice grew shrill in her despair.
"You will not pardon me! I shall die with
your curse on my head. Mercy! mercy! That
good man, Mr. C., assured me you would be
merciful. Have you never wronged another?
Has the Evil One never tempted you?"

Then I spoke in broken accents: "Me! Oh,
had it been me you defamed—but a young
creature so harmless, so unoffending, and for so
miserable a motive!"

"But I tell you, I swear to you, I never
dreamed I could cause such sorrow; and that
young man, that Margrave, put it into my
head!"

"Margrave! He had left L——long before
that letter was written."

"But he came back for a day, just before I
wrote: it was the very day. I met him in the
lane yonder. He asked after you after Miss
Ashleigh; and when he spoke he laughed, and I
said, 'Miss Ashleigh had been ill, and was gone
away;' and he laughed again. And I thought
he knew more than he would tell me, so I asked
him if he supposed Mrs. Ashleigh would come
back, and said how much I should like to take
this house if she did not; and again he laughed,
and said, 'Birds never stay in the nest after the
young ones are hurt,' and went away singing.
When I got home, his laugh and his song
haunted me. I thought I saw him still in my
room, prompting me to write, and I sate down
and wrote. Oh, pardon, pardon me! I have
been a foolish poor creature, but never meant to
do such harm. The Evil One tempted me!
There he is, near me now! I see him yonder!
there, at the doorway! He comes to claim me!
As you hope for mercy yourself, free me from
him! Forgive me!"

I made an effort over myself. In naming
Margrave as her tempter, the woman had
suggested an excuse echoed from that innermost
cell of my mind, which I recoiled from gazing
into, for there I should behold his image.
Inexpiable though the injury she had wrought against
me and mine, still the woman was human—
fellow-creature—like myself;—but HE?

I took in both my hands the hand that still
pressed my arm, and said, with firm voice,

"Be comforted. In the name of Lilian, my
wife, I forgive you for her and for me as freely
and as fully as we are enjoined by Him, against
whose precepts the best of us daily sin, to
forgive—we children of wrath—to forgive one
another!"

"Heaven bless you! oh, bless you!" she
murmured, sinking back upon her pillow.

"Ah!" thought I, "what if the pardon I
grant for a wrong far deeper than I inflicted on
him whose imprecation smote me in this chamber,
should, indeed, be received as atonement, and
this blessing on the lips of the dying annul the
dark curse that the dead has left on my path
through the Valley of the Shadow!"

I left my patient sleeping quietly,—the sleep
that precedes the last. As I went down the
stairs into the hall, I saw Mrs. Poyntz standing
at the threshold, speaking to the man-servant
and the nurse.