“There was only one other way to accomplish my purpose. It was and still is my wish that everything I have in the world shall be yours when I die. You are the woman I love, and though I have no right to say so to you now, my love for you is the one supreme passion of my life—the first, the last, the only one. Pardon me for saying that, and please forget it, at least for the present. I have relatives, but they are worse than dead to me, as you shall hear presently. I would rather destroy everything I have by fire or flood than allow one cent of it to pass into their unworthy hands. Enough of that. Let me go on. “There was only one way in which I could carry out my purpose, and that was the one I adopted. I could not consult you about it or ask your permission, for that would have been indeed to affront you in precisely the way in which you now tell me I have affronted you. It would have been to ask you to accept a money gift at my hands while I yet lived. I intended, instead, to give you all I possess, only after my death and in effect by my will or its equivalent. I did not intend you to be embarrassed by any knowledge of my act, until a bullet or shell should have laid me low. Now I want you to speak, please. I want you to say that you understand, and that you forgive me.” “I understand,” she said; “there is nothing to forgive; but now that I know your purpose, I cannot permit it. You must cancel those papers.” “Does it make no difference that I have told you I love you, and that I should entreat you to be my wife if I were free to do so?” “I do not see,” she replied, “that that makes a difference.” “Do not decide the matter now, wait!” he half entreated, half commanded. “Let me finish what I have to say. Let me tell you why I must do this thing. Wait!” He paused for a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. Then he told her his life-story, omitting nothing, concealing nothing, palliating nothing. That done, he went on:— “You understand now why I was driven to the course I have adopted with you. You understand that as an honourable man I could not ask you for love, leaving you in ignorance of the fact that I am under a conviction of felony. My sentence is at an end, of course, and I cannot be rearrested, inasmuch as I am officially adjudged to be dead. But that makes no difference in my duty. I could not honourably reveal my love to you until you should know the facts. I do not now ask you to accept my wrecked life and to forget the facts that have wrecked it. I have no right to ask so great a sacrifice at your hands. I ask only that you shall permit me to regard you as the woman I love, the woman I should have sought to make my wife if I had been worthy. I ask your permission so to arrange my affairs, or so to leave them as already arranged, that at my death all that I have will pass into your hands. You can never know or dream or imagine how I love you, Evelyn. Surely it is only a little thing that I ask of you.”