“Has anything gone wrong?” she asked.

“Make your mind easy,” he answered.  “Nothing has gone wrong.”

“Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?”

“None whatever.  The marriage is a certainty.”

“A certainty?”

“Yes.”

“Good-night.”

She put her hand out through the door.  He took it with some little surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand of her own accord.

“You have sat up too long,” he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold fingers.  “I am afraid you will have a bad night—­I’m afraid you will not sleep.”

She softly closed the door.

“I shall sleep,” she said, “sounder than you think for.”

It was past two o’clock when she shut herself up alone in her room.  Her chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table.  She sat down for a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her letter to Norah, and turned to the end where the blank space was left.  The last lines written above the space ran thus:  “...  I have laid my whole heart bare to you; I have hidden nothing.  It has come to this.  The end I have toiled for, at such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or die.  It is wickedness, madness, what you will—­but it is so.  There are now two journeys before me to choose between.  If I can marry him—­the journey to the church.  If the profanation of myself is more than I can bear—­the journey to the grave!”

Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines: 

“My choice is made.  If the cruel law will let you, lay me with my father and mother in the churchyard at home.  Farewell, my love!  Be always innocent; be always happy.  If Frank ever asks about me, say I died forgiving him.  Don’t grieve long for me, Norah—­I am not worth it.”

She sealed the letter, and addressed it to her sister.  The tears gathered in her eyes as she laid it on the table.  She waited until her sight was clear again, and then took the banknotes once more from the little bag in her bosom.  After wrapping them in a sheet of note paper, she wrote Captain Wragge’s name on the inclosure, and added these words below it:  “Lock the door of my room, and leave me till my sister comes.  The money I promised you is in this.  You are not to blame; it is my fault, and mine only.  If you have any friendly remembrance of me, be kind to your wife for my sake.”

After placing the inclosure by the letter to Norah, she rose and looked round the room.  Some few little things in it were not in their places.  She set them in order, and drew the curtains on either side at the head of her bed.  Her own dress was the next object of her scrutiny.  It was all as neat, as pure, as prettily arranged as ever.  Nothing about her was disordered but her hair.  Some tresses had fallen loose on one side of her head; she carefully put them back in their places with the help of her glass.  “How pale I look!” she thought, with a faint smile.  “Shall I be paler still when they find me in the morning?”