back, and ask for a letter at the post
office. I forbid explanations and excuses. I forbid heartless allusions
to your duty. Let me have an answer which does not keep me for a moment
in suspense.

"'For the last time, I ask you: Do you consent to be my wife? Say,
Yes--or say, No.'

"I gave her back the letter--with the one comment on it, which the
circumstances permitted me to make:

"'You said No?'

"She bent her head in silence.

"I went on--not willingly, for I would have spared her if it had been
possible. I said, 'He died, despairing, by his own hand--and you knew
it?'

"She looked up. 'No! To say that I knew it is too much. To say that I
feared it is the truth.'

"'Did you love him?'

"She eyed me in stern surprise. 'Have _I_ any right to love? Could I
disgrace an honorable man by allowing him to marry me? You look as if
you held me responsible for his death.'

"'Innocently responsible,' I said.

"She still followed her own train of thought. 'Do you suppose I could
for a moment anticipate that he would destroy himself, when I wrote my
reply? He was a truly religious man. If he had been in his right mind,
he would have shrunk from the idea of suicide as from the idea of a
crime.'

"On reflection, I was inclined to agree with her. In his terrible
position, it was at least possible that the sight of the razor
(placed ready, with the other appliances of the toilet, for his
fellow-traveler's use) might have fatally tempted a man whose last hope
was crushed, whose mind was tortured by despair. I should have been
merciless indeed, if I had held Miss Jethro accountable thus far. But
I found it hard to sympathize with the course which she had pursued, in
permitting Mr. Brown's death to be attributed to murder without a word
of protest. 'Why were you silent?' I said.

"She smiled bitterly.

"'A woman would have known why, without asking,' she replied. 'A woman
would have understood that I shrank from a public confession of my
shameful past life. A woman would have remembered what reasons I had
for pitying the man who loved me, and for accepting any responsibility
rather than associate his memory, before the world, with an unworthy
passion for a degraded creature, ending in an act of suicide. Even if I
had made that cruel sacrifice, would public opinion have believed such
a person as I am--against the evidence of a medical man, and the verdict
of a jury? No, Mr. Morris! I said nothing, and I was resolved