hose startling changes of mind that are
sometimes witnessed before death,--changes whereby the whole character
of a life seems to undergo solemn transformation. The hard will becomes
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 background 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 fallen 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 Ashleigh, 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 hands; my heart heaved with the agony
of my suppressed 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 I whom you
defamed--but a young creature so harmless, so u