She put the paper into an envelope, and as soon as the morning had dawned, she asked her servant Lorenzo to show her the way to the nearest notary in whose presence she signed the document and directed him to whom it should be sent in case of her own death.
And after another visit to a pharmacien, she returned to the palazzo and took up her watch again in the now deserted bedchamber.
Her servants brought her refreshments and pressed her to eat, without effect. All she desired, she told them, was to be left alone, until the sister came for her in the afternoon.
Sister Angelica arrived true to her appointment, and went at once to the bedchamber. To her surprise she found Harriet lying on the bed, just where the corpse of Anthony Pennell had lain, and apparently asleep.
“Pauvre enfant!” thought the kind-hearted nun, “grief has exhausted her! I should not have attended to her request, but have watched with her through the night! Eh, donc! ma pauvre,” she continued, gently touching the girl on the shoulder, “levez-vous! Je suis là.”
But there was no awakening on this earth for Harriet Pennell. She had taken an overdose of chloral and joined her husband.
When Margaret Pullen received the will which Harriet had left behind her, she found these words with it, scribbled in a very trembling hand upon a scrap of paper.
“Do not think more unkindly of me than you can help. My parents have made me unfit to live. Let me go to a world where the curse of heredity which they laid upon me may be mercifully wiped out.”
THE END.