"What is it?" he asks.
"It is almost impossible to say. Typhoid fever, one doctor says, and cerebro spinal meningitis says the other. It doesn't much matter what it is, since both agree in this—that she is dying."
Her sobs breaks forth again. He sits and gazes at her like a stone.
"There is no hope?"
"While there is life there is hope." But it is in a very dreary voice that Trix repeats this aphorism: "and—the worst of it is, she doesn't seem to care. Charley, I believe she wants to die, is glad to die. She seems to have nothing to care for—nothing to live for. 'My life has been all a mistake,' she said to me the other day. 'I have gone wrong from first to last, led astray by my vanity, and selfishness, and ambition. It is much better that I should die, and make an end of it all.' She has made her will, Charley—she made it in the first days of her illness, and—she has left almost everything to you."
He makes no reply. He sits motionless in the twilit window, looking down at the noisy, bustling street.
"She has remembered me most generously," Trix goes softly on; "poor, darling Edith! but she has left almost all to you. 'It would have been an insult to offer anything in my lifetime,' she said to me; 'but the wishes of the dead are sacred,—he will not be able to refuse it then. And tell him not to grieve for me, Trixy—I never made him anything but trouble, and disappointment, and wretchedness. I am sorry—sorry now, and my last wish and prayer will be for the happiness of his life.' When she is delirious, and she mostly is as night draws on, she calls for you incessantly—asking you to come back—begging, you to forgive her. That is why I sent."
"Does she know you sent?" he asks.
"No—it was her desire you should not be told until—until all was over," Trix answered with another burst of tears; "but I couldn't do that. She says we are to bury her at Sandypoint, beside her mother—not send her body to England. She told me, when she was dead, to tell you the story of her separation from Sir Victor. Shall I tell it to you now, Charley?"
He makes a motion of assent; and Trix begins, in a broken voice, and tells him the sad, strange story of the two Sir Victors, father and son, and of Edith's life from her wedding-day. The twilight deepens into darkness, the room is wrapped in shadow long before she has finished. He never stirs, he never speaks, he sits and listens to the end. Then there is a pause, and out of the gloom he speaks at last: