has not struck me dead.  Yes, Pauline, I know you’ve loved me; but remember this one thing, in all your bitter thoughts of me hereafter:  remember this, you have not loved me as I have loved you.  You have not given up earth and heaven both for me as I have done for you.  For you?  No, not for you, but for the shadow of you, for the thought of you, for these short weeks of you.  And then, an eternity of absence, and of remorse, and of oblivion—­ah, if it might be oblivion for you!  If I could blot out of your life this short, blighting summer; if I could put you back to where you were that fresh, sweet morning that I walked with you beside the river!  I loved you from that day, Pauline, and I drugged my conscience, and refused to heed that I was doing you a wrong in teaching you to love me.  Pauline, I have to tell you a sad story:  you will have to go back with me very far; you will have to hear of sins of which you never dreamed in your dear innocence.  I would spare you if I could, but you must know, for you must forgive me.  And when you have heard, you may cease to love, but I think you will forgive.  Listen.”

Why should I repeat that terrible disclosure? why harrow my soul with going back over that dark path?  Let me try to forget that such sins, such wrongs, such revenges, ever stained a human life.  I was so young, so innocent, so ignorant.  It was a strange misfortune that I should have had to know that which aged and changed me so.  But he was right in saying that I had to know it.  My life was bound involuntarily to his by my love, and what concerned him was my fate.  Alas!  He was in no other way bound to me than by my love:  nor ever could be.

I don’t know whether I was prepared for it or not:  I knew that something terrible and final was to come, and I felt the awe that attends the thoughts that words are final and time limited.  But when I heard the fatal truth—­that another woman lived to whom he was irrevocably bound—­I heard it as in a dream, and did not move or speak.  I think I felt for a moment as if I were dead, as if I had passed out of the ranks of the living into the abodes of the silent, and benumbed, and pulseless.  There was such a horrible awe, and chill, and check through all my young and rapid blood.  It was like death by freezing.  It is not so pleasant as they say, believe me.  But no pain:  that came afterward, when I came to life, when I felt the touch of his hand on mine, and ceased to hear his cruel words.

I had shrunk back from him in my chair, and sat, I suppose, like a person in a trance, with my hands in my lap, and my eyes fixed on him with bewilderment.  But when he ceased to speak—­and, leaning forward on one knee, clasped my hands in his, and drew me toward him, then indeed I knew I was not dead.  Oh, the agony of those few moments—­I tried to rise, to go away from him.  But he held me with such strength—­all his weakness was gone now.  He folded his arms around my waist and held me as in a vise.  Then suddenly leaning his head down upon my arms, he kissed my hands, my arms, my dress, with a moan of bitter anguish.