She fell back on her pillow: “In God's sight ... married ... married ... my—Oh, I have never said it before ... but now, ... can't I?”
The Bishop nodded, smiling.
“My husband, ... my husband, ... dear heart, ... Good-bye....”
She tried to reach under her pillow to draw out something, and then she smiled and died.
When Alice Westmore dressed her for burial an hour afterwards, her heart was shaken with a bitterness it had never known before—a bitterness which in a man would have been a vengeance. For there was the smile still on the dead face, carried into the presence of God.
Under the dead girl's pillow lay the picture of Richard Travis.
The next day Alice sent the picture to Richard Travis, and with it a note.
“It is your's,” she wrote calmly, terribly calm—“from the girl who died believing she was your wife. I am helping bury her to-day. And you need not come to Westmoreland to-morrow night, nor next week, nor ever again.”
And Richard Travis, when he read it, turned white to his hard, bitter, cruel lips, the first time in all his life.
For he knew that now he had no more chance to recall the living than he had to recall the dead.