All her life she had been a woman of iron will. She had made herself and every one except her husband bend to it. She summoned it now. She would try. She would make one supreme effort to right the great wrong of her life. If in the other world to which she knew she was going in a few short hours there was opportunity to meet the husband she had loved as she had loved nothing else on earth besides herself, she would like to tell him that she had tried—that at the last hour she had tried to make some amends. With the extraordinary strength which mind sometimes gives to body at times of great necessity, as in cases of soldiers mortally wounded fighting to the end, the woman crawled out of the bed and dragged herself over to the desk. Her eyes were bright with her great purpose and blazed like sunken fires. Her gray, thin hair straggled down upon the collar of the old dressing-gown she had put on when first taken sick. She seized her quill pen and a sheet of paper that lay there, and with cramped, shaking hand wrote, "Dawn is here," and signed her name, "Maria Van Rensselaer." The scrawl was almost unreadable, but she dared not try to write it over. She dared not add another word. Her time was short. Her strength already was failing. She had yet to get the message into some one’s hands. Perhaps even now she would fail. She crushed the folds together with her cold fingers, wrote "Charles Winthrop" and the address, and then tottered across the room to the door. She almost fell as she reached the stair-landing. The dizzy, blinding blackness that seemed pressing upon her almost overwhelmed her. She felt the pain and torment surging back, but she fought it off and would not yield. This was her last chance to make amends—her last chance. She said it over to herself as she clung to the banisters and got down the stairs clumsily. If Dawn had been in the house, she must have heard her. It looked like miles to the front gate as the sick woman came out on the piazza, but somehow she got there—a queer, ghastly figure of death, clinging to the gate-post, with a letter and a purse in her hand. In the distance she saw a negro approaching. He was scuttling along with a frightened gait, as if he wished to hurry through the street. She felt her strength going. If she could only stand up till he reached her! It seemed to her hours before he came to the gate. She had kept back out of sight, instinctively feeling he would be scared away if he saw her. "Take that to the post office or God will punish you!" she said, in the deep, hoarse voice the disease had given her, and thrust the letter and the purse upon him.