“Poor, patient heart, you will not have to stay by me much longer. I believe your presence has held my spirit back from death a while, yet now I feel I am going fast. Bless you for the comfort you have been to my dying hours. In these few days you have seemed to be almost mine.”
The girl’s beautiful brown eyes grew dim, and she laid her hand gently on his.
“I want you to forgive me for all the trouble I have brought into your life,” she said. “I ought not to have married you without loving you. I—I—might have tried, after all, to care for you—only—only—for mother’s sake,” with a choking sob.
He sighed at the thought of the poor, weak woman whose death he had undoubtedly hastened by his folly and madness.
“It is better as it is,” he said hastily. “I was not—am not—any mate for you, Fair. My life was wild and wicked before I knew you. Once I was a thief—yes, that was the terrible power that Belva Platt held over me. I was persuaded to join a gang of burglars, who robbed a bank. Some of them were apprehended, but I escaped, and so frightened was I that I vowed to reform my wild career. But Belva Platt found out, through her wicked old grandmother, the sin of my past, and held it over me like a rod of iron. You know now the secret of her power over me. But, alas! I fell in love with the fate she forced upon me, and for all that followed after our wedding night I alone am to blame.”
He sighed, and lay silent a few minutes, then resumed:
“Belva is dead now. I am told that she was the only one that lost her life in the fall of the factory. I believe that my shameful secret is buried with her, and I am glad that it is so. It can never rise to throw its dark shadow on my memory. I hope that I shall be remembered by the only act I ever did that was worthy the name of a prince—the saving of Waverley Osborne’s life.”
“That brave deed wipes out all the past,” Mrs. Howard said reassuringly, and he thanked her with a grateful smile.
A few hours later he died very peacefully, clinging to Fair’s hand and gazing on her face to the last.
She had grown to pity him so much that she could not rejoice at his death, although she felt that now all the shadows had passed from her life, leaving her free to be loved and to love again.