han before.
"While that lasts, there's no love 'twixt you and me, and it'll last me
till my death."

"Then why do you trouble me. If you don't love me, why do you hang about
me wherever I go? We'll be better friends away from each other than
together. Why don't you leave me alone?"

"Ha! ha! we must be quits for that, you know," she answered, rather
wildly, and pointing to her forehead. "Do you think I'm a poor whining
fool like her, to get sick and die when you abuse me? I'll haunt you
till I die, Philip; and after, too, if I can, to punish you for that."

Philip fancied that he detected the gleam of insanity in her eye, and he
was not wrong, for the terrible blow he had inflicted had injured her
brain; and her mind, weakened by dissipation and the action of
excitement upon her violent temperament, was tottering upon the verge of
madness.

"When I was watching that poor sick girl," she continued, "I thought I
could have loved her, she was so beautiful and gentle, as she lay there,
white and thin, and never speaking a word against you, Philip, but
thinking of her friends far away, and asking to be taken home--home,
where her mother was sleeping under the sod--home, to be loved and
kissed again before she died. And I would have loved her if I hadn't
hated you so much that there wasn't room for the love of any living
creature in my bad heart. I used to sit all night and hear her
talk--talk in her dreams and in her fever--as if there were kind people
listening to her, people that were kind to her long ago. And the room
seemed full of angels sometimes, so that I was afraid to move and look
about; for I could swear I heard the fanning of their wings and the
rustle of their feet upon the carpet. Sometimes I saw big round tears
upon her wasted cheeks, and I wouldn't brush them away, for they looked
like jewels that the angels had dropped there. And then I tried to cry
myself, but, ha! ha! I had to laugh instead, although my heart was
bursting. I wished I could have cried; I'm sure it would have made my
heart so light, and perhaps it would have burst that ring of hot iron
that was pressing so hard around my head. It's there now, sinking and
burning right against my temples. But I can't cry, I haven't since I was
a little girl, long ago, long ago; but I think I cried when mother died,
long ago, long ago."

She was speaking in a kind of dreamy murmur, while Philip paced the
room; and finally she sank down upon the floor, an