he drew my
ear closer to her lips. I think her great desire just then was to
utter her own thought more fully before she passed. Certainly it was
no avowal or consolation from myself she sought.

"Your forgiveness," I heard distinctly, "I need your full
forgiveness."

It was for me a terrible and poignant moment. The emptiness of my pity
betrayed itself too mercilessly for me to bear; yet, before my
bewilderment enabled me to frame an answer, she went on hurriedly,
though with a faultless certainty: the meaning to her was clear as
day:

"Born of love ... the only true forgiveness..."

A film formed slowly. Her eyes began to close, her breath died off
into a sigh; she smiled, but her head sank lower with her fading
strength. And her final words went by me in that sigh:

"Yet love in you lies unawakened still... and I must try again...."

There was one more effort, painful with unexpressed fulfilment. A
flicker of awful yearning took her paling eyes. Life seemed to
stammer, pause, then flush as with this last deep impulse to yield a
secret she discerned for the first time fully, in the very act of
passing out. The face, with its soft loveliness, turned grey in death.
Upon the edge of a great disclosure--she was gone.

I remember that for a space of time there was silence all about us.
The doctor still kept his back to us, the driver had ceased his
wretched hammering, I heard the wind in the poplar and the hum of
insects. A bird sang loudly on a branch above; it seemed miles away,
across an empty world.... Then, of a sudden, I became aware that the
weight of the head and shoulders had dreadfully increased. I dared not
turn my face lest I should look upon her whom I had deeply
wronged--the forsaken tenement of this woman whose matchless love now
begged with her dying breath for my forgiveness!

A cowardly desire to lose consciousness ran through me, to forget
myself, to hide my shame with her in death; yet, even while this was
so, I sought most desperately through the depths of my anguished pity
to find some hint, if only the tiniest seed, of love--and found it
not.... The rest belonged to things unrealized....

I remember a hand being laid upon me. I lifted my head which had
fallen close against her cheek. The doctor stood beside me, his grave
and kindly face bent low. He spoke some gentle words. I saw him
replacing the needle in its little leathern case, unused.

Marion was dead, her deep secret undisclosed.