One night I was lying in bed reading by candle-light. The door softly opened. My heart stopped. She stood there in a long white night-gown, trembling in the cold air, bare-footed, ghastly pale. There was something in the eyes that awed me.
"I am dying now," she said. Her voice was low, melodious, and as though from far-away; from another place, another body, another soul. "Some one must kiss me once—love me once, properly, before I go. Will you, Mary?"
I had jumped out of bed. I wrapped my dressing-gown round her, and supporting her cold and tottering body led her back to her own room, and comforting her all the while got her back into bed, and slipped down gently beside her.
I pressed her tenderly to me and told her a dozen foolish times that she would soon be better.
"No"—she spoke in English as I did—"it is over. I wish it had been over long ago. I had a heart that could have loved the world, but no one loved me in return. I shall die a good Catholic, but religion has never given me comfort—never what it has given you. I loved my little sister: but it was all one-sided, and that is not Love at all. Love is when the getting and the giving are equal, when the two bodies change souls. There is only love. Poor little Suzanne, she could not help it. I could never have seen in her eyes what I longed for her to see in mine. Oh, the need for some one to love me; sometimes my poor heart could have burst. I was not wanted in the world. I was—not—wanted."
The sentences came oddly, disjointedly, further and further apart.
For some moments she had not spoken. Then, suddenly, her arms tightened round me in supreme yearning; she placed her lips hard upon mine in an embrace of ultimate passionate sadness; her body trembled violently, and then, in a swift second, was still.
The lips were cold. My arms were round a corpse. I freed myself, got up, lit a candle.
The old misery had for ever left her eyes, which were happy, and full of love. I closed them reverently, kissed each lid as I closed it, and went out to awaken the household.