“Oh! my husband, God forbid that you should ever see the rooms and the people with whom I have spent this last miserable week—the last of my life, I am certain it will be the last of my life. They have given me a narrow straw bed and a wooden chair, on which I sit all the day long with my face to the wall, dreaming such leaden, gloomy dreams. Now and then an oath or a coarse laugh makes me shudder to think where I am. “Sometimes when a strange step comes along the floor, my poor heart gives a struggle, and I think it is you come to look after your poor little wife. Then I fancy in a desperate way that my brother will come to the hospital in search of me; and I feel a dreary satisfaction that with this dress, this thin face, and great wild eyes, he would go away and never dream it was me. Besides, I have never used either his name or yours; when you come to look for the register of my death, ‘Mary Barton is the name.’ Next to it you will find written the brand of infamy which I do not deserve: but my promise was given. “I have told no one of our marriage; but the angels will know it, and you will know it. And now I wish to write of something else, but cannot. My eyes fill with tears, my cheek burns, and my pen wanders to and fro on the paper. I charge you, Louis De Marke—I charge you with my dying breath, sweep the disgrace I am willing to bear myself from the name of your child!... “Oh, Louis! my heart is broken; the last gleam of hope has departed. I shall not have the power to die, for this anguish will put death aside. Now I understand the dreary doubt which has been forever haunting my life. It was an unconscious want which kept me restless from the first. Now I comprehend it all. You never loved me. I have forced myself to write the words—it seems like tearing a young tree up by the roots. All the strings and pulses of my heart quiver. “Why not have told me this before it was too late? but no, it was a happy delusion; I cannot grudge myself the only sweet dream of my life. The truth would not have made me less desolate now. “How did I learn this?—listen. In the next bed to mine is a young person, whose face struck me from the first, a fair, beautiful girl, with the most sorrowful eyes I ever saw. She came to the hospital shortly after I did, and like me, sat by her bed day after day, in mournful silence. Sometimes she would sew a little—sometimes read a tract or the Bible, which so few inmates of that place ever touch. It is hard to be utterly alone in the world, and I had been months without intercourse with a human being of my own class. One day, when she looked unusually sad, I spoke to her, and after that we fell into miserable companionship, for I knew by every look and word, that she never had belonged to the class of women about us.