"You will have heard already, Barbara dear, all that has happened—and why I killed him. It was a quarrel—a matter of money."
She looked at me with a world of understanding in her eyes. "That is what you have told every one; it is not what you can tell me," she said. "Think, dear"—she laid her hand on my arm, and her lips were quivering, although she spoke bravely enough—"you are to die to-morrow; by the love there is between us, you must not let me believe that you killed a man for such a thing as that. Unless you would kill my soul for ever."
"I can tell you nothing else," I replied as steadily as I could. "Perhaps I was not, after all, half so good as you in your love for me believed."
"You will at least not lie to me," she pleaded. "Tell me at least one thing: was there no talk about me between you?"
I did not answer, but my eyes must have done that for me; she went on, with a little quick note of triumph in her voice. "Ah—I begin to understand. He slandered me—said something of me that your love would not allow?"
"Barbara," I broke in hoarsely, "whatever has happened has been done by me of my own free will, and I must pay the penalty. As I hope to meet my God, and as I hope I may be understood then, I beg you will ask me nothing more. I pay with my life; don't take my victory from me."
"Then I was right," she exclaimed quickly. "I seemed to know it from the first. He met me in the wood that day, just as your guardian had done; he had met me before at my father's house. I was afraid of him, as I was afraid of no one else; I could read, as only a woman can read, what was stamped all over him. Oh—my dear—my dear"—she had sunk suddenly to her knees in that dreary place beside the bed on which I sat—"he was not worth it!"
"Let one thing be clear between us—and it is a dying man who speaks," I said, holding her face between my hands, and looking down into her eyes—"you must be silent. No word of this must ever pass your lips, for your own sake—for the sake of every one. The time is coming when you will remember me only as some one who lived, far back in the years, and who loved and worshipped you; and you will keep what is our secret."
"I can't do that; it would shame me for ever," she whispered. "I must speak; I must make them understand."
"If you go out of this place, leaving with me a certainty that you will speak, you kill me doubly," I said earnestly. "Think what it means to me; nothing you can do or say now will save me; that is not in our hands. Let me die, believing that I helped you and saved you, and I die a happy man. Go out and spread your story, and tell the truth, and I die shamed in my own sight, leaving you shamed behind me. Because the lie I tried to kill will spring alive again, to be babbled by a hundred tongues."