Her face illuminated for the first time. “Oh, yes!” she said. “Oh, yes! Then I think I could sleep in peace.”
Thorpe rang for Cochrane and the gardener, wrote the paper, and had it duly witnessed. It took but a few moments, and they were alone again.
“I wonder if I shall see her—and you again, or if my unlucky star sets in this world to rise in the next? Well, I shall know soon.
“I am going, I think,” she said a few moments later. “Would you mind kissing me? Death has already taken the sin out of my body, and down deep is something that never was wholly blackened. That is yours. Take it.”
It was an hour before she died, and during that hour he kissed her many times.
A FRAGMENT
It was some twelve years later that Thorpe received a copy of a San Francisco newspaper, in which the following article was heavily marked:—