“Heaven and hell,” I said, “can’t alter that.”
“I’ve wanted—” she went on. “I’ve talked to you in the nights and made up speeches. Now when I want to make them I’m tongue-tied. But to me it’s just as if the moments we have had lasted for ever. Moods and states come and go. To-day my light is out...”
To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I imagined she said “chloral.” Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis flashed it on my brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freak of memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There the word stands in my memory, as if it were written in fire.
We came to the door of Lady Osprey’s garden at last, and it was beginning to drizzle.
She held out her hands and I took them.
“Yours,” she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; “all that I had—such as it was. Will you forget?”
“Never,” I answered.
“Never a touch or a word of it?”
“No.”
“You will,” she said.