"Not long after this episode a neighbor called at my house one morning, and told me that, having missed the old woman from the weekly market, and knowing how regular she had always been in her attendance, he had gone to her dwelling and found her lying sick and desiring to see me. Of course I immediately prepared to comply with her request, providing myself in case I should find her anxious for absolution and the viaticum. Directly I entered her hut, she beckoned me to the bedside, and said in a low, hurried voice:—
"Father, I wish to confess to you at once, for I know I am going to die.'
"Perceiving that, for the present at least, she was perfectly sane, I willingly complied with her request, and heard her slowly and painfully unburden her miserable soul.
"Monsieur, if the story with which Virginie Giraud intrusted me had been told only in her sacramental confession, I should not have been able to repeat it to you. But, when the final words of peace had been spoken, she took a packet of papers from beneath her pillow and placed it in my hands. `Here, father,' she said, `is the substance of my history. When I am dead, you are free to make what use of it you please. It may warn some, perhaps, from yielding to the great temptation which overcame me.'
"'The temptation of a bribe?" said I, inquiringly. She turned her failing sight towards my face and shook her head feebly.
"`No bribe, father," she answered. `Do you believe I would have done what I did for mere coin?"
"I gave no reply, for her words were enigmatical to me, and I was loath to harass with my curiosity a soul so near its departure as hers. So I leaned back in my chair and sat silent, in the hope that, being wearied with her religious exercises, she might be able to sleep a little. But, no doubt, my last question, working in her disordered mind, awoke again the madness that had only slumbered for a time. Suddenly she raised herself on her pillow, pressed her withered hands to her head, and cried out wildly:—
"`Money!—money to me, who would have sold my own soul for one day of his love! Ah! I could have flung it back in their faces!—foo's that they were to believe I cared for gold! Philip! Philip! you were mad to think of the heiress as a wife; it had been better for you had you cared to look on me—on me who loved you so! Then I should never have ruined you—never betrayed you to Lady Sarah! But I could not forgive the hard words you gave me; I could not forgive your love for Julia! Shall I ever go to paradise—to paradise where the saints are? Will they let me in there?—will they suffer my soul among them? Or shall I never leave purgatory, but burn, and burn, and burn there always uncleansed? For, oh! if all the past should come back to me a thousand years hence, I should do the same thing again, Phil Brian, for love of you!'
"She started from the bed in her delirium; there came a rattling sound in her throat—a sudden choking cry—and in a moment her breast and pillow and quilt were deluged with a crimson stream! In her paroxysm she had burst a blood-vessel. I sprang forward to catch her as she fell prone upon the brick floor; raised her in my arms, and gazed at her distorted features. There was no breath from the reddened lips. Virginie Giraud was a corpse.
"Thus in her madness was told the secret of her life and her crime; a secret she would not confess even to me in her sane moments. It was no greed of gold, but despised and vindictive love that lay behind all the horrors she had related. From my soul I pitied the poor dead wretch, for I dimly comprehended what a hell her existence on earth had been.