“For you, dear?” wistfully.
“Do not let us speak of that now. I—I am too nervous,” she murmured.
“I understand, and I will not tease you by begging for your love—for I have a confession to make to you—my dying confession—and when you have heard it I cannot blame you if you hate me.”
How she pitied him now—she who had hated him only last night. But death cancels all resentments.
She wiped the dew from his cold brow with her soft and gentle hand. She stroked his fair curls softly, thinking how handsome he was in his fair style—only no one could approach her splendid lover, Dallas.
“I shall pray God to let you live,” she whispered; and a sudden hatred came to her for the fiend whose cowardly bullet had laid low this promising life.
“Wait till I tell you all,” he sighed remorsefully. “Ah, Daisie, I have done you a cruel wrong, but I cannot go down to death without confessing it, and then you will hate my very memory.”
“No, no—I will forgive you!” she murmured, out of her womanly sympathy.
“Ah, you don’t know it yet,” Royall Sherwood cried, half accusingly, and added: “I told you last night that I did not know what Lutie had done, but it was false. I was in the plot to deceive you. I went to her with my troubles, and my fear of losing you, since you were going away, and she suggested the plan to get you to help us last night, and make the wedding a real one. I agreed to it, and won you for my bride by a fraud, a hideous lie.”
Startled beyond the power of speech, she gazed at him in dumb horror.