I have loved too much, dear, so the power of life is burnt out for me.  My great love—­love for my mother, for my darling baby, and above all for you—­has consumed me and I cannot live much longer.

Forgive me for not telling you this before—­for deceiving you by saying that I was getting better and growing stronger when I knew I was not.  I used to think it was cowardice which kept me from telling you the truth, but I see now that it was love, too.

I was so greedy of the happiness I have had since I came to this house of love that I could not reconcile myself to the loss of it.  You will try to understand that (won’t you, dear?), and so forgive me for keeping you in the dark down to the very last moment.

This will be a great grief to you.  I would die with a glad heart to save you a moment’s pain, yet I could not die at ease if I did not think you would miss me and grieve for me.  I like to think that in the time to come people will say, “Once he loved Mary O’Neill, and now there is no other woman in the world for him.”  I should not be a woman if I did not feel like that—­should I?

But don’t grieve too much, dearest.  Only think!  If I had been strong and had years and years still to live, what a life would have been before me—­before both of us.

We couldn’t have lived apart, could we?  And if we had married I should never have been able to shake off the thought that the world, which would always be opening its arms to you, did not want me.  That would be so, wouldn’t it—­after all I have gone through?  The world never forgives a woman for the injuries it inflicts on her itself, and I have had too many wounds, darling, to stand by your side and be any help to you.

Oh, I know what you would say, dearest.  “She gave up everything for love of me, choosing poverty, obscurity, and pain above wealth and rank and ease, and therefore I will choose her before everything else in the world.”  But I know what would come to us in the end, dear, and I should always feel that your love for me had dragged you down, closed many of the doors of life to you.  I should know that you were always hearing behind you the echoing footsteps of my fate, and that is the only thing I could not bear.

Besides, my darling, there is something else between us in this world—­the Divine Commandment!  Our blessed Lord says we can never be man and wife, and there is no getting beyond that, is there?

Oh, don’t think I reproach myself with loving you—­that I think it a sin to do so.  I do not now, and never shall.  He who made my heart what it is must know that I am doing no wrong.

And don’t think I regret that night at Castle Raa.  If I have to answer to God for that I will do so without fear, because I know He will know that, when the cruelty and self-seeking of others were trying to control my most sacred impulses, I was only claiming the right He gave me to be mistress of myself and sovereign of my soul.