“I must part from everything that reminds me of him,” she said.  “Keep the key wherever you please—­I shall never want it again.”

Before I could say a word she had turned away to her book-case, and had taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright’s drawings.  She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume fondly in her hands—­then lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

“Oh, Laura!  Laura!” I said, not angrily, not reprovingly—­with nothing but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my heart.

“It is the last time, Marian,” she pleaded.  “I am bidding it good-bye for ever.”

She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened her hair.  It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and shoulders, and dropped round her, far below her waist.  She separated one long, thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and pinned it carefully, in the form of a circle, on the first blank page of the album.  The moment it was fastened she closed the volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands.

“You write to him and he writes to you,” she said.  “While I am alive, if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never say I am unhappy.  Don’t distress him, Marian, for my sake, don’t distress him.  If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his drawings, with my hair in it.  There can be no harm, when I am gone, in telling him that I put it there with my own hands.  And say—­oh, Marian, say for me, then, what I can never say for myself—­say I loved him!”

She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in my ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost broke my heart to hear.  All the long restraint she had imposed on herself gave way in that first last outburst of tenderness.  She broke from me with hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm of sobs and tears that shook her from head to foot.

I tried vainly to soothe her and reason with her—­she was past being soothed, and past being reasoned with.  It was the sad, sudden end for us two of this memorable day.  When the fit had worn itself out she was too exhausted to speak.  She slumbered towards the afternoon, and I put away the book of drawings so that she might not see it when she woke.  My face was calm, whatever my heart might be, when she opened her eyes again and looked at me.  We said no more to each other about the distressing interview of the morning.  Sir Percival’s name was not mentioned.  Walter Hartright was not alluded to again by either of us for the remainder of the day.

10th.—­Finding that she was composed and like herself this morning, I returned to the painful subject of yesterday, for the sole purpose of imploring her to let me speak to Sir Percival and Mr. Fairlie, more plainly and strongly than she could speak to either of them herself, about this lamentable marriage.  She interposed, gently but firmly, in the middle of my remonstrances.