"I wonder whether it will be fair to let you marry me after I've forgotten," she continued, thoughtfully. "I don't know, but I ought to make you promise now that you won't ask me to be your wife, for, of course, I shouldn't then know any reason for refusing you."
"I wouldn't promise that."
"Oh, but you wouldn't do so mean a thing as to take an unfair advantage of my ignorance," she replied. "Any way, I now release you from your engagement to marry me, and leave you to do as you choose tomorrow after I've forgotten. I would make you promise not to let me marry you then, if I did not feel that utter forgetfulness of the past will leave me as pure and as good as if—as if—I were like other women;" and she burst into tears, and cried bitterly for a while.
The completeness with which she had given herself up to the belief that on the morrow her memory was to be wiped clean of the sad past, alternately terrified him and momentarily seduced him to share the same fool's paradise of fancy. And it is needless to say that the thought of receiving his wife to his arms as fresh and virgin in heart and memory as when her girlish beauty first entranced him, was very sweet to his imagination.
"I suppose I'll have mother with me then," she said, musingly. "How strange it will be! I've been thinking about it all day. I shall often find her looking at me oddly, and ask her what she is thinking of, and she will put me off. Why, Henry, I feel as dying persons do about having people look at their faces after they are dead. I shouldn't like to have any of my enemies who knew all about me see me after I've forgotten. You'll take care that they don't, won't you, Henry?"
"Why, dear, that is morbid. What is it to a dead person, whose soul is in heaven, who looks at his dead face? It will be so with you after to-morrow if the process succeeds."
She thought a while, and then said, shaking her head—
"Well, anyhow, I'd rather none but my friends, of those who used to know me, should see me. You'll see to it, Henry. You may look at me all you please, and think of what you please as you look. I don't care to take away the memory of anything from you. I don't believe a woman ever trusted a man as I do you. I'm sure none ever had reason to. I should be sorry if you didn't know all my faults. If there's a record to be kept of them anywhere in the universe, I'd rather it should be in your heart than anywhere else, unless, maybe, God has a heart like yours;" and she smiled at him through those sweetest tears that ever well up in human eyes, the tears of a limitless and perfect trust.
At one o'clock the next afternoon Madeline was sitting on the sofa in Dr. Heidenhoff's reception-room with compressed lips and pale cheeks, while Henry was nervously striding to and fro across the room, and furtively watching her with anxious looks. Neither had had much to say that morning.
"All ready," said the doctor, putting his head in at the door of his office and again disappearing. Madeline instantly rose. Henry put his hand on her arm, and said—