ow
bright gleams of hope upon its dark mysteries. I have no hope of any
other life, save the one I am quitting! If I am resigned and calm, it
is because the lamp of my life has burnt out, and I am in darkness. I
wait for death as a maiden waits for the first gleams of dawn on her
marriage day.

Who said that love was everlasting? They lied! Love is a dream, a
floating shadow full of golden lights, quenched by the first breath of
morning! Who should know, if I do not know? Who has done more for love
than I--I whose hands are red with blood, I who this night must die?
It was for his sake, I struck--for his sake! and now that the hour of
my punishment must come, I sit here alone and forsaken, waiting for
the signal which must end my life! It was for his sake! A death-white
face rises up before me, and a hoarse, dying cry sobs ever in my ears!
I pass on my way through the Valley of the Shadow of Death with no
hope to cheer me, forsaken, friendless, and shaken with dim fears!
Am I alone! He for whom I struck has turned from me. Oh, the bitter
cruelty of it! It was he who taught me what love was, and yet of love
he knows nothing, else I would not be here to meet my doom alone!
Oh! Paul, Paul! Oh, for one touch of your hand, for one kind look! My
heart is sick and faint with longing! Am I indeed so low and vile a
thing that you should turn away with never a single word of farewell?
O! my love, you are hard indeed! If my hands are stained with
blood--for whose sake was it? It was only a word I craved for, Paul!
Only a word--a look, even! Was it too great a boon to grant?

* * * * *

Oh, memory! help me, help me to keep sane just a few more hours--until
the end comes. It is a last luxury! I will think of those golden days
we spent together ere the blow fell. Ah! how happy we were! Every
breath of life was sweet; every moment seemed charged with the
delicious happiness! The past, with its haunting shadows, and the
memory of that grim, deathly figure huddled up amongst the ferns
in the bare pine wood had perished. Background and foreground had
vanished in the bewildering joys of the present. Oh! Paul, that was
happiness, indeed. All measures of outside things seemed lost! At
times I found it hard to recollect in what country we were! Oh! the
world, such as ours was, is a sweet, sweet world!

At last the blow fell. He came to me one morning, as white as a sheet,
with an old, soiled copy of the Ti