“Oh, Louis! my heart is broken; the last gleam of hope has departed. I shall not have the power to die, for this anguish will put death aside. Now I understand the dreary doubt which has been forever haunting my life. It was an unconscious want which kept me restless from the first. Now I comprehend it all. You never loved me. I have forced myself to write the words—it seems like tearing a young tree up by the roots. All the strings and pulses of my heart quiver.
“Why not have told me this before it was too late? but no, it was a happy delusion; I cannot grudge myself the only sweet dream of my life. The truth would not have made me less desolate now.
“How did I learn this?—listen. In the next bed to mine is a young person, whose face struck me from the first, a fair, beautiful girl, with the most sorrowful eyes I ever saw. She came to the hospital shortly after I did, and like me, sat by her bed day after day, in mournful silence. Sometimes she would sew a little—sometimes read a tract or the Bible, which so few inmates of that place ever touch. It is hard to be utterly alone in the world, and I had been months without intercourse with a human being of my own class. One day, when she looked unusually sad, I spoke to her, and after that we fell into miserable companionship, for I knew by every look and word, that she never had belonged to the class of women about us.
“I think two more unhappy beings never lived than we were; still, there was some consolation in the mournful sympathy which we felt for each other. Some days, when the morning sunshine came through the window which separated her bed from mine, we would get up a gleam of cheerfulness, and strive to encourage each other, knowing all the time how futile it was. When I attempted to comfort her, she answered me kindly, but was too sorrowful for consolation. The gloom of coming anguish, and probable death, hung over us both. We had no heart for words.
“It is terrible here at night. I cannot sleep, with so many strange women breathing heavily around me. The hush of the city chills me through and through. It seems like lying in a graveyard, especially when the slow sob of the river comes up to me through the silence. This other poor girl is often awake in the night. When she does sleep, it is restlessly, and sometimes her moans break into words.
“This night, this very night—it seems long as eternity—she began to murmur in her dreams as I lay weary and wakeful. All at once I started up in bed and listened. She had uttered a name,—your name, De Marke, uttered it softly as a dove coos in its nest.
“That one word was a revelation to me. Quick as light my thoughts flew back to the past—a thousand proofs, trivial but convincing, crowded upon me. The vague uncertainty that had kept me always so restless, was a miserable conviction now. No, not yet, I would not believe the mutterings of a dream—there should be no uncertainty.
“I leaned from my cot and grasped the white arm of the sleeping girl, which had fallen downward over the side of her bed. She awoke with a start, and I saw her blue eyes fixed wildly on my face.
“‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘was it the son of George De Marke, a shipping-merchant lately dead, of whom you spoke but now?’ She lifted her white hands and clasped them wildly.
“‘Did I speak of him? when? how? Who tells me that I spoke of De Marke?’ she said.