"What need to tell you more. Florelle de l'Heris was dying, and I had killed her. The child that I had loved so selfishly had loved me with all the concentrated tenderness of her isolated and impassioned nature; the letter I wrote bidding her farewell had given her her death-blow. They told me that from the day she received that letter everything lost its interest for her. She would sit for hours looking down the road to Luz, as though watching wearily for one who never came, or kneeling before the pictures I had left as before some altar, praying to Heaven to take care of me, and bless me, and let her see me once again before she died. Consumption had killed her mother in her youth; during the chill winter at the Nid de l'Aigle the hereditary disease settled upon her. When I found her she was dying fast. All the medical aid, all the alleviations, luxuries, resources, that money could procure, to ward off the death I would have given twenty years of my life to avert, I lavished on her, but they were useless; for my consolation they told me that, used a few months earlier, they would have saved her! She lingered three weeks, fading away like a flower gathered before its fullest bloom. Each day was torture to me. I knew enough of the disease to know from the first there was no hope for her or me. Those long terrible night-hours, when she lay with her head upon my shoulder, and her little hot thin hands in mine, while I listened, uncertain whether every breath was not the last, or whether life was not already fled! By God! I cannot think of them! One of those long summer nights Florelle died; happy with me, loving and forgiving me to the last; speaking to the last of that reunion in which _she_, in her innocent faith, believed and hoped, according to the promise of her creed!--died with her hands clasped round my neck, and her eyes looking up to mine, till the last ray of light was quenched in them--died while the morning dawn rose in the east and cast a golden radiance on her face, the herald of a day to which she never awoke!" * * * * * There was a dead silence between us; the Arno splashed against the wall below, murmuring its eternal song beneath its bridge, while the dark heavy clouds drifted over the sky with a sullen roll of thunder. He lay back in his chair, the deep shadow of the balcony pillar hiding his face from me, and his voice quivered painfully as he spoke the last words of his story. He was silent for many minutes, and so was I, regretting that my careless question had unfolded a page out of his life's history written in characters so painful to him. Such skeletons dwell in the hearts of most; hands need be tender that disentomb them and drag out to daylight ashes so mournful and so grievous, guarded so tenaciously, hidden so jealously. Each of us is tender over his own, but who does not think his brother's fit subject for jest, for gibe, for mocking dance of death?