“Fanny,” said he, with a choking voice, “my poor Fanny!” He sprinkled water on her face, and she opened her eyes.
“I am going, Edward,” said she.
“No, no!—you will not die now. O, don’t die till you have forgiven me for being your mur—”
“Don’t say that—I forgive as I would be forgiven. Our child—”
A hard fit of coughing and copious bleeding hindered her from speaking for some time.
“Our poor Marie—give her to your Cousin Charles; he has wealth and none to care for. Promise me that you will do this.”
The husband, trembling with fear, gave her the required promise, when she strangled from an excessive rush of blood into the trachea, and died with her daughter clinging madly around her neck.
Edward Evans, the gambler and man about town, was alone with his dead wife, who, fourteen years before, he had persuaded to elope from her parents, and to marry him. She had gone through every gradation of suffering and poverty, and but for a strange run of luck that he had had for two or three evenings, she would have died in that dark, cold room, alone with her child, and have been buried in Potter’s Field. As it was, Evans had a basket of coal, a pound of candles, some food, and money to buy his wife a grave. And wretched as he was, we must do him the justice to say that he was glad to be able to bury his wife decently. And he did it.
And now he bethought him of her last request. He must make the effort to give away the child, who had clung to the corpse of her mother to the last moment, and who had not seemed to see or hear at all, since that mother was buried out of her sight.
——