-"

Brother Bonaday lay and panted, not seeming to hear, still with his
eyes upturned to the ceiling of his narrow cell. They scanned it as
if feebly groping a passage through.

"I ought to have told you," he muttered.--"More than once I meant--
tried--to tell you."

"Hey?"

Brother Copas bent lower.

"She--Corona--never was my child. . . . Give me your hand. . . .
No, no; it's the truth, now. Her mother ran away from me . . .
and she, Corona, was born . . . a year after . . . in America . . .
Coronation year. The man--her father--died when she was six months
old, and the woman . . . knowing that I was always weak--"

He panted, very feebly. Brother Copas, still holding his hand,
leaned forward.

"Then she died, too. . . . What does it matter? Her message. . . .
'Bluff,' you would call it. . . . But she knew me. She was always
decided in her dealings . . . to the end. I want to sleep now. . . .
That's a good man!"

Brother Copas, seeking complete solitude, found it in the dusk of the
garden beyond the Ambulatory. There, repelling the benediction of
sunset that still lingered in the west, he lifted his face to the
planet Jupiter, already establishing its light in a clear space of
sky.

"Lord!" he ingeminated, "forgive me who counted myself the ironeist
of St. Hospital!"

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROTHER COPAS***

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