"I have something else to confess, a wrong and a misfortune."
"Didn't you confess it to the priest?" she asked in surprise.
"I hardly told him anything," was all he replied.
And he resumed, speaking calmly, with his full voice:
"I wrote poems during our engagement, poems about ourselves. The manuscript was named after her. We read the poems together, and we both liked and admired them. 'Beautiful, beautiful!' she would say, clapping her hands, whenever I showed her a new poem. And when we were together, the manuscript was always with us—the most beautiful book that had ever been written, we thought. She did not want the poems to be published and get away from us. One day in the garden she told me what she wanted. 'Never! Never!' she said over and over again, like an obstinate, rebellious child, tossing her dainty head with its dancing hair."
The man's voice became at once surer and more tremulous, as he filled in and enlivened certain details in the old story.
"Another time, in the conservatory, when it had been raining monotonously since morning, she asked, 'Philip'—she used to pronounce my name just the way you do."
He paused, himself surprised by the primitive simplicity of what he had just expressed.
"'Do you know,' she asked, 'the story of the English painter Rossetti?' and she told me the episode, which had so vividly impressed her, how Rossetti had promised the lady he loved to let her keep forever the manuscript of the book he had written for her, and if she died, to lay it beside her in her coffin. She died, and he actually carried out his promise and buried the manuscript with her. But later, bitten by the love of glory, he violated his promise and the tomb. 'You will let me have your book if I die before you, and will not take it back, will you, Philip?' And I promised laughingly, and she laughed too.
"I recovered from my illness slowly. When I was strong enough, they told me that she had died. When I was able to go out, they took me to the tomb, the vast family sepulchre which somewhere hid her new little coffin.