“So there is no hope for me!” in a clear, angelic voice.

It was Louise, with her hand on my shoulder.  She made me get up, and carried me off to her small drawing-room.  With a beseeching glance, she went on: 

“Stay with me to the end; I won’t have doleful faces round me.  Above all, I must keep the truth from him.  I know that I have the strength to do it.  I am full of youth and spirit, and can die standing!  For myself, I have no regrets.  I am dying as I wished to die, still young and beautiful, in the perfection of my womanhood.

“As for him, I can see very well now that I should have made his life miserable.  Passion has me in its grips, like a struggling fawn, impatient of the toils.  My groundless jealousy has already wounded him sorely.  When the day came that my suspicions met only indifference —­which in the long run is the rightful meed of all jealousy—­well, that would have been my death.  I have had my share of life.  There are people whose names on the muster-roll of the world show sixty years of service, and yet in all that time they have not had two years of real life, whilst my record of thirty is doubled by the intensity of my love.

“Thus for him, as well as for me, the close is a happy one.  But between us, dear Renee, it is different.  You lose a loving sister, and that is a loss which nothing can repair.  You alone here have the right to mourn my death.”

After a long pause, during which I could only see her through a mist of tears, she continued: 

“The moral of my death is a cruel one.  My dear doctor in petticoats was right; marriage cannot rest upon passion as its foundation, nor even upon love.  How fine and noble is your life! keeping always to the one safe road, you give your husband an ever-growing affection; while the passionate eagerness with which I threw myself into wedded life was bound in nature to diminish.  Twice have I gone astray, and twice has Death stretched forth his bony hand to strike my happiness.  The first time, he robbed me of the noblest and most devoted of men; now it is my turn, the grinning monster tears me from the arms of my poet husband, with all his beauty and his grace.

“Yet I would not complain.  Have I not known in turn two men, each the very pattern of nobility—­one in mind, the other in outward form?  In Felipe, the soul dominated and transformed the body; in Gaston, one could not say which was supreme—­heart, mind, or grace of form.  I die adored—­what more could I wish for?  Time, perhaps, in which to draw near the God of whom I may have too little thought.  My spirit will take its flight towards Him, full of love, and with the prayer that some day, in the world above, He will unite me once more to the two who made a heaven of my life below.  Without them, paradise would be a desert to me.