“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to part this way. But I did not expect”—and she drew a long breath—“happiness!”
“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank in the expression of his eyes—the love, the longing, the misery—as if it had been a draught of life.
“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last—love!”
There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you—you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself.”
“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been.”
“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”
“With this little candle? No, no, dear—my dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think—yes, I feel that—that I shall know and thrill.”
Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.
The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.
“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red ribbons at your neck.”