"'I was to blame,' I answered. 'Heaven forbid that I should try to excuse my own fault. But do you think that lets you out? Suppose the positions had been reversed; suppose you had been ill and Milton with me. Do you imagine he would have let me remain in ignorance while you lay dying and in need of me, no matter what I told him to do or not to do? Are you so weak and mean that you can't conceive of any one being strong and good?'
"'It was because I loved you so much that I did it,' he said.
"'Oh, Adrian,' I told him, 'if you really loved me, why did you let me do a thing you knew I'd live to regret? If you really loved me, what had you to fear but that?'
"'You might have saved his life,' he answered.
"Oh, James, the anguish of hearing those words from his lips! The man I did not love telling me I might have saved the life of the man I did! For now that it was too late I knew well enough who it was that I loved. In one flash I saw the two men as they were, one strong, quiet, unselfish, the other selfish, cowardly, mean-spirited. Now I saw why he had not wanted me to tell my stepmother of our engagement. He wanted to cover up his own part in the affair in case anything unpleasant happened when I heard of Milton's death.
"I told my stepmother everything as soon as I could and she behaved splendidly. She sent Adrian away and I never saw him again. And as I announced my intention of going home on the next steamer she decided it was best to give up the rest of her trip and take the boys along back with me. So we all went, that same week.
"People wondered, when we arrived so long ahead of time, and came pretty near to guessing the whole truth. But I didn't care. The one thing I wanted in the world was to see Milton's sister, his one surviving relative.
"'Jane Leffert,' I wrote her, 'if you can bear to look on the woman who killed your brother, let her come and tell you she's sorry.' She was a good woman and understood. The next day I went to her house. She took me upstairs and showed me his room, the bed where he had died. I never said a word all the time. Then, as she was really a very remarkable woman, she handed me an old brooch of her mother's containing a miniature of him painted when he was four years old, and told me it was mine to keep. Then for the first time I broke down and cried....
"If it hadn't been for Jane Leffert I think I should have gone mad. She never tried to hide the truth from me. She admitted, when I asked her, that Milton had, to all intents and purposes, worked himself to death for me, and that the doctor had said the one hope for him lay in his seeing me or hearing I was coming to him. But never a word of blame or reproach did she give me, never a hint of a feeling of it. She knew how easy it is to make mistakes in life, she knew how hard it is to atone for them. She it was who gave me the blessed thought that it was worth while to go on living as part of my atonement, and that if I put into my life the things I had learned from him I might even, to a certain extent, make Milton live on in me.
"So instead of taking poison or becoming a Carmelite nun I went on living at home as before, stimulated and inspired by that idea. It was hard at first, but somehow the harder things were the greater the satisfaction I took in life. By the time I had lightened the remaining years of my stepmother's life and nursed Jane Leffert through her last illness I became content with my lot and, in a way, happy. I never asked for happiness nor wanted it again on earth, but it came, at last. There is something purifying about loving a dead person very much. The chief danger is in its making one morbid, but as I was always a thoroughly practical person with a strong natural taste for life it did me nothing but good. But I don't prescribe it for any one who can get anything better....