Night fell. My mother, Miss Edith, and the doctor had gone down to the dining-room. Juliana and I were alone. The lamps had not yet been brought in. October's purplish twilight entered the room; from time to time the wind shook the windows.
"Help me, Tullio, help me!" she cried, in the bewilderment of the spasm, her arms stretched toward me, looking at me with dilated eyes, whose whites were of an extraordinary whiteness in the darkness that made her face livid.
"Tell me, tell me, what can I do to help you?" I stammered, distracted, not knowing what to do, caressing the hair on her temples with a gesture in which I would have liked to impart a supernatural power. "Tell me, tell me, what shall I do?"
She stopped complaining; she looked at me, listened to me, as if forgetful of her pain, as if seized by surprise, stupefied, no doubt, by the sound of my voice, by the expression of my bewilderment and anguish, by the trembling of my fingers on her hair, by the distressed tenderness of that inefficacious gesture.
"You love me, don't you?" she said, without ceasing to look at me, as if not to lose the slightest sign of my emotion. "You forgive everything?"
And, becoming exalted again, she cried:
"You must love me! You must love me very much now, because to-morrow I shall not be here, because I shall die to-night; to-night, perhaps, I shall be dead. And you would be sorry for not having loved me, for not having pardoned me. Oh! yes, you would be sorry."
She seemed so sure of dying that a sudden terror froze me.
"You must love me! Perhaps you do not believe what I told you one night; perhaps you do not believe me yet; but you will surely believe me when I am gone. Then the light will enter your soul, then you will understand the truth; and you will repent not having loved me enough, not having forgiven me."
Sobs choked her utterance.