"If there should be meeting past the grave, some day you and I shall come together again with no barrier between us. I take with me the knowledge of your love, which has sheltered and strengthened and sustained me since the day we first met, and which must make even a grave warm and sweet.
"And, remember this—dead though I am, I love you still; you and my little lame baby who needs me so and whom I must leave because I am not strong enough to stay.
"Through life and in death and eternally,
"Yours,
"Constance."
In the letter was enclosed a long, silken tress of golden hair. It curled around Miriam's fingers as though it were alive, and she thrust it from her. It was cold and smooth and sinuous, like a snake. She folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope with the lock of hair, then returned it to its old hiding-place, with Barbara's.
"So, Constance," she said to herself, "you came for the letters? Come and take them when you like—I do not fear you now."
The Evidence
All of her suspicions were crystallised into certainty by this one page of proof. Constance might not have violated the letter of her marriage vow—very probably had not even dreamed of it—but in spirit, she had been false.
"Come, Constance," said Miriam, aloud; "come and take your letters. When the hour comes, I shall tell him, and you cannot keep me from it."
Triumph
She was curiously at peace, now, and no longer afraid. Her dark eyes blazed with triumph as she lay there in the candle light. The tension within her had snapped when suspicion gave way to absolute knowledge. Thwarted and denied and pushed aside all her life by Constance and her memory, at last she had come to her own.