Again she closed her eyes. "Thanks. It is almost a comfort to be able to tell some one. I know now how fearfully lonely I have been. And yet—I wish I hadn't met you—or I will wish it. Now I can wish nothing, and feel nothing—except that you are there, alive, and that I am going to die. But it will be harder to do now. Everything seems so vague, everything seems left behind. The very sorrow that makes me do it seems so far away—like a dream. I can't go through all the realization again, and when I do it now, it will seem to be for something unreal." Her voice trailed off.
"Are you sure you are going to do it?" Haldicott asked presently.
They spoke very slowly, with long pauses, as though a monotony of leisure were about them; as though, in some quiet, dim place of departed spirits, time had ceased.
"Yes; quite sure. I have bought it—the poison—I had a doctor's prescription—I have thought it all out carefully. It's in the top drawer of my dressing-table."
She would, he saw, tell him everything.
Again he paused.
"Is it an irremediable sorrow that makes life impossible, or is it life itself, in general, that you can't go on with?"
"Both—both," said Allida.
Again a long, long silence grew; every moment, Haldicott felt, a drop in the deep cup of oblivion that, unconsciously, she was drinking, that would make the past more and more unreal, until from oblivion she woke into the sane world of struggle and life.
"Yet you are so young," he said at last, "with everything before you—real joys as well as—forgive me!—realer sorrows; they would balance better if you would live a little longer. You know, if you waited for just one year, let us say, you would look back with wonder at this, with thankfulness that you hadn't."