“Juliet was not herself—­not in her full sane mind—­when I promised her.  That I know.  But I could no more have refused the promise than water to her dying lips.  One awful evening of fever and hallucination I had been sitting by her for a long time.  Her thoughts, poor sufferer, had been full of blood—­it is hard to write it—­but there is the truth—­a physical horror of blood—­the blood in which her dress—­the dress they took from her, her first night in prison—­was once steeped.  She saw it everywhere, on her hands, the sheets, the walls; it was a nausea, an agony of brain and flesh; and yet it was, of course, but a mere symbol and shadow of the manifold agony she had gone through.  I will not attempt to describe what I felt—­what the man who knows that his neglect and selfishness drove her the first steps along this infernal road must feel to his last hour.—­But at last we were able—­the nurse and I—­to soothe her a little.  The nightmare lifted, we gave her food, and the nurse brushed her poor brown hair, and tied round it, loosely, the little black scarf she likes to wear.  We lifted her on her pillows, and her white face grew calm, and so lovely—­though, as we thought, very near to death.  Her hair, which was cut in prison, had grown again a little—­to her neck, and could not help curling.  It made her look a child again—­poor, piteous child!—­so did the little scarf, tied under her chin—­and the tiny proportions to which all her frame had shrunk.

“She lifted her face to mine, as I bent over her, kissed me, and asked for you.  You were brought, and I took you on my knee, showing you pictures, to keep you quiet.  But every other minute, almost, your eyes looked away from the book to her, with that grave considering look, as though a question were behind the look, to which your little brain could not yet give shape.  My strange impression was that the question was there—­in the mind—­fully formed, like the Platonic ‘ideas’ in heaven; but that, physically, there was no power to make the word-copy that could have alone communicated it to us.  Your mother looked at you in return, intently—­quite still.  When you began to get restless, I lifted you up to kiss her; you were startled, perhaps, by the cold of her face, and struggled away.  A little color came into her cheeks; she followed you hungrily with her eyes as you were carried off; then she signed to me, and it was my hand that brushed away her tears.

“Immediately afterward she began to speak, with wonderful will and self-control, and she asked me that till you were grown up and knowledge became inevitable, I should tell you nothing.  There was to be no talk of her, no picture of her, no letters.  As far as possible, during your childhood and youth, she was to be to you as though she had never existed.  What her thought was exactly she was too feeble to explain; nor was her mind strong enough to envisage all the consequences—­to me,