“'Now,' she said, 'now that I have spoken; now that I have told you everything; now that I have told you that I have gone on loving you more and more and more--now--I am going to die.' “'You have not asked me to forgive you,' I said. “'No,' she replied. 'For what is forgiveness? I do not know exactly what that word means. It is supposed to wipe out something that has happened, is it not?--to make things the same as they were before! But it does not do that. That which has happened, has happened; and you and I know it.' “'You had better live,' I said; 'I no longer consider you worthless. I feel that you are worthy of my anger now.' “Her face cleared almost into something like joy. “'I have told the truth, and I raise myself from the depths of your scorn to the place where you can feel a hot rage against me?' she asked. “'Yes,' I said. And the light on her face was like that of which some women are capable when they are told that they are beloved. “'And if I die?' she asked. “'Who knows but that you might climb by it?' I said. 'Who knows but what your death might turn my anger to love again?' And with that I turned and left her there. “That night I sat all night in my study, and in the morning they brought me the news that she was dead. She must have used some poison. What, I do not know; and the physicians called it heart-failure. But what is the matter, Doctor?” “Nothing, nothing!” said Dr. Beaulieu. And he motioned for the narrator to proceed. But there were beads of perspiration upon the healer's forehead, and a pallor overspread his face. “I had condemned her to death,” the penitent went on, “and she had been her own executioner. She had loved me; she had sinned against me; but she had always loved me; she had hated the flesh that sinned, and scorned it as much as I; her life was intolerable and she had been her own executioner. “The revulsion of feeling came. I loved her again; now that I had lost her. All that day I shut myself up, seeing no one; refusing to look at the dozens of telegrams that came pouring in from friends and acquaintances, thinking--thinking--thinking---- “Night came again; and with it the word that the best friend I had was in the house; a friend of my college days, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me in many a fight, then and since. He had come to be under the same roof with me in the hour of my bitterest bereavement, was the word he sent--how bitter now, he did not know. But he did not intrude upon the privacy of my grief. And I sat thinking--thinking--thinking-- “Suddenly the idea came to me that I would go upstairs to the chamber where she was, and look at her once more. Quietly I stole up the stairs, and through the hushed, dim house, on into the gloomy room, lighted only by the candles at the head and foot of the curtained couch on which she lay.