She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and an ashy paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the fatal letter which was a sealed secret to her, and a torture of jealous suspicion—suspicion of that other woman who had been the shadow and the poison of her life—wrung her to the heart. After moving a few steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back again. Armed with the double courage of her love and her despair, she pressed her lips on her dying husband’s cheek, and pleaded with him for the last time. Her burning tears dropped on his face as she whispered to him: “Oh, Allan, think how I have loved you! think how hard I have tried to make you happy! think how soon I shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don’t, don’t send me away!”
The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the recollection of the love that had been given to him, and never returned, touched the heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing had touched it since the day of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke from him. He looked at her, and hesitated.
“Let me stay,” she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.
“It will only distress you,” he whispered back.
“Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from you!”
He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.
“If I let you stay a little—?”
“Yes! yes!”
“Will you go when I tell you?”
“I will.”