"Gracie, sweetheart, forgive—!"
As he fell back fainting in the arms of the irate doctor, who was taken unawares by his patient's unexpected action, and who was savagely cursing his own remissness in not having strapped him to the table, the woman rose from her knees and with one hand pressed to her heart, tottered unsteadily towards the door. Ballard, springing to her assistance, recoiled at the hopeless despair and misery written on that face. At the threshold she hesitated a moment, steadying herself with one hand braced against the casing. Then of a sudden she turned and walked firmly to the table; disregarding the surgeon's indignant remonstrance, she leaned over the unconscious man and laid her lips on his. For a full minute she held them there, her form as motionless as his, then with the slowness of one who is wearied unto death, she raised her head and stood with closed eyes beside him.
The men's faces were averted and their heads bowed as she went silently out. For not a one of them but was fully conversant with her relations to Douglass, and one of them at least knew of his engagement to Grace Carter.
But all of them were awed by the tragedy of this woman's misspent love, all reverently silenced by the atoning sacrifice offered up in that heart-breaking kiss of renunciation.
A week later when Douglass had regained full consciousness he was informed that Mr. and Mrs. Brevoort had returned to New York. He felt not a little hurt at her unceremonious departure without a word of farewell to him and was inclined to be morose and splenetic during the succeeding fortnight of convalescence. From Red McVey he had learned of Grace's departure on the day of his mishap, and was much relieved to know that she was probably unaware of his injury at the time of leaving, it being very doubtful if she had even heard of it up to the present time; her foreign address being unknown to any of her western friends, there had been no interchange of correspondence, and local happenings of this nature were not of sufficient Interest to the eastern public to receive insertion in the New York papers. At least that is what he thought, forgetting that a robbery of the mails is an item of universal interest and also overlooking the fact that he was now a millionaire, whose attempted assassination by a ringleader of the desperadoes had been the welcome justification for glaring scare-heads in all the metropolitan dailies. It would have cut him to the quick had she been cognizant of his trouble and evinced no interest. He was also cynically resentful of Constance's apparent defection, ungenerously attributing it to her fear of being compromised.
Imagine his contrition when Ballard one day sought him out and delivered unto him an envelope addressed in Constance's familiar dainty chirography, admitting its detention for over three weeks by her express command.
"I was not to give it to you until you were fairly off the puny list," said the marshal gravely, "and there is something else that you should know before you read that letter."
And he proceeded to relate without any embellishment the facts in the matter of Matlock's taking off, supplementing them with other details of interest to the man who sat for hours after his friend had gone in bitter self-communion. It was quite dark when he went supperless to his room and opened the cream-tinted envelope.
The hours came and passed unrecked, and the gray dawn found him still sitting by the rickety little table, head in hands, poring dully over the lines that to his disordered fancy seemed written in her heart's blood.
"I am going away to-morrow, out into the pitiful Nothing in which all things end; and soon I will be even less than a memory to you. It is best so, for I would not have you hampered by a single regret in your enjoyment of the happiness that the future holds for you.
"You owe me nothing, although I have given you all—and gloried in the giving. For you at least vouchsafed me, through barred windows, a glimpse into the sanctuary where such as I may not enter. I realize now that it was impossible for me to have ever entered into the holy of holies; and yet, dear, can you blame me for hoping?
"I know now that I could never have entered fully into your life; the clay of my being leans too awry for that. But am I to blame for the shaking of the Potter's hand? I sought with all the assiduity of a weak woman's love, but there was a door to which I never found the key, a veil behind which I could not peer. Yet to me was given the rapture of the outer temple—and it was the bread of life.
"Be generous to me in this, the hour of my bitter atonement, and believe that my love was as pure and unselfish as it is possible for a woman to give. The proof of it is that I am giving you up now when I know that by a little finesse I could pull you down to hell with me. For I have spilled the Red Wine for you, my Wolf, and the reek of it would have been a bond and heel-rope between us.
"It is because of my love for you that I am giving you up, giving you into the hands of another woman. I have been but a flame to you, burning out the dross from your nature so that she might pour into her heart's crucible only the pure gold. God grant she mold the chalice aright.
"And now farewell while I have yet strength to say it. Forget me if you can. But if from the heights you ever look backward and downward, and in the sea of memory catch one faint reflection of me, let the thought be a kindly one.
"For oh, Man, who was more than God to me, I loved you too well!"