“Nothing. My wants are few, and they will be but for a short while, as you know just one week from to-day I am to be hanged.”
“So soon?”
“Yes, it is to be on Friday, the thirteenth of the month.”
“And are you prepared to die, Mr.—Mr.—Arden?”
“In what sense do you mean, Miss Carr?”
“Have you made your peace with God and man?”
“I leave my life to man, who will take it, and if I have a soul it must go to the keeping of God, who gave it.”
“Then you will not pray for forgiveness for your sins?”
“I will ask no mercy of a God whose laws I have outraged, and I ask nothing of man. I have taken human life, and I have committed every sin in the calendar of wickedness, I suppose. Yet all might have been different had my earlier years been shaped in a different way, Miss Carr.
“My mother was lenient and forgiving, my father allowed me free rein, and the only check I had upon my temper and temptations was my little sister, then too young to understand me, or guide me aright. When I fell in love with one who could have brought me back from the precipice I was upon; could have made a good man of me, ready to atone for the past in every way in my power, I found that she turned from me for the love of another, my rival, whom I hated.