'You've not been happy with him, I know, my sister; but I don't blame you. Your marriage was not a psychological union; and when marriage isn't that, woman cannot set her foot on the lowest temple of Eros.' 'I'm too ill to talk with you,' Kate replied, 'but I loved my husband well, too well. I keep all my little remembrances of him in that box; they aren't much--not much--but I should like him to have them when I'm gone, so that he may know that I loved him to the last. Perhaps then he may forgive me. Will you let me see them?' She looked at the packet of letters, kissed the crumpled calico rose, the button she had pulled off his coat in a drunken fit and preserved for love, and she even slipped on her wrist the last few pearls that remained of the chaplet she wore when they played at sweethearts in _The Lovers' Knot_. But after the love-tokens had been put back in the box, and Kate again asked Mrs. Forest to bring Dick to her, she began to ramble in her speech, and to fancy herself in Hanley. The most diverse scenes were heaped together in the complex confusion of Kate's nightmare; the most opposed ideas were intermingled. At one moment she told the little girls, Annie and Lizzie, of the immorality of the conversations in the dressing-rooms of theatres; at another she stopped the Rehearsal of an _opéra bouffe_ to preach to the mummers--in phrases that were remembrances of the extemporaneous prayers in the Wesleyan Church--of the advantages of an earnest, working religious life. It was like a costume ball, where chastity grinned from behind a mask that vice was looking for, while vice hid his nakedness in some of the robes that chastity had let fall. Thus up and down, like dice thrown by demon players, were rattled the two lives, the double life that this weak woman had lived, and a point was reached where the two became one, when she began to sing her famous song: 'Look at me here, look at me there,' alternately with the Wesleyan hymns. Sometimes in her delirium she even fitted the words of one on to the tune of the other. Still, Laura took no notice, and her pen continued to scratch, scratch, till it occurred to her that although Dick's marriage had not been a psychological one, it might be as well that he should see his wife before she died; and having come to this conclusion suddenly, she put on her bonnet and left the house. The landlady brought in the lamp, placing it on the table, out of sight of the dying woman's eyes.