“I thought that I did at first,” Nina answered. “My pride, my resentment rose up in arms against him, and I said, I will never forgive him for his sin. But then I remembered that his dying mother had solemnly bound me to love him, and so I could not take my heart away from him even if I would. And, oh, Mrs. Fielding, I had loved him for five long years, and it was not easy to hate him then. Even if I had tried ever so hard I could not have done it. I think my love was deep enough to have pleased even a poet,” and she read again from her book: “Unless you can muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed you; Unless you can love as the angels may With the breath of heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast, Through behooving and unbehooving; Unless you can die when the dream is past Oh, never call it loving!” “Oh, what a future of happiness Talbot Strangemore blighted by his folly,” Mrs. Fielding thought, gazing at the fair, young face and listening to the tender, musical voice. “One heart like Nina’s, so fresh, so pure, so true, is worth a hundred fickle coquettes like Sibyl St. Alban.” And she could not help from despising Talbot Strangemore a little for his folly. But then she did not know how the beautiful coquette had lured him on and on, until she had fatally wrecked his happiness. * * * * * The flowers bloomed, the birds sang, the gay pageant of the summer moved on. Nina’s brief respite was almost over. And every application for pardon, every prayer for a commutation of the sentence, every entreaty for a longer respite even, had been refused! They had no longer any hope. It seemed that public opinion was terribly against the beautiful young prisoner. The governor was afraid to show her even the slightest favor, lest it should be said that he had been tempted by the glitter of her gold. He must let the law take its due course. There was no longer any hope, no longer any time even, for the last day of her life was ended and at sun rise she must die--die an ignominious death upon the scaffold, she the young, the pure, the lovely, the last descendant of the proud old Selwyn race! Only yesterday she had made her will. She had given ten thousand dollars to Miss Drusilla, ten thousand to her faithful maid, Kitty, ten thousand to her dear friends, the Fieldings, and she had gratefully remembered her lawyer, her minister, her servants, and given all the rest to Talbot. At night the silver-haired old minister who had baptized her when she was a baby, who had received her into his church, who had married her to Talbot Strangemore, and who had always watched tenderly over her orphan girlhood, had administered the sacrament to her and a few chosen friends, had blessed her, and gone away to return at daylight. All of earth was over now, and the dawn of the new day was rising fairly upon the closing scene in the tragedy of her brief life.