"Oh, God! oh, God!" I groaned. "Marion, you will not die and leave me! Tell me what to do."
"Kiss me," she whispered.
But even as I stooped to obey, her spirit fled, and I kissed the lips of a corpse. No other kiss shall my lips know while I have life.
At the fall of noon I carried her from the house of death and buried her in the grave which Sir Charles Venner had destined for us both. It was in the middle of a pine forest, and perhaps that is why the saddest sound on earth to my ears is still the sighing of pines. I left the bodies of my enemies where they had fallen—accursed carrion! I would not have touched them if I could. They were not discovered until more than a week had passed, and by then I was a thousand miles away, a desolate and broken-hearted wanderer on the face of the universe. Many years have passed and I am now a millionaire, accounted by the world a hard-headed, flinty-hearted financial magnate, and also something of a misogynist. But I have recorded these chapters of my history to show those who come after me, when I am dead, that, rascal as I was, and abandonedly selfish, I was yet capable of passion and of constancy, and that no deep-seated hatred of the softer sex has inspired the invincible solitariness of my life.
FINIS.
Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
Ward, Lock & Co.'s
POPULAR FICTION
STANLEY WEYMAN