I finished the picture and sent it home within a week. I tried to make it--what you see.--Too late, you say? Yes--for her; but not for me or for the public. If she could be made to feel, for a day longer, for an hour even, that her miserable secret _was_ a secret--why, she’d made it seem worth while to me to chuck my own ambitions for that ... * * * * * Lillo rose, and taking down the sketch stood looking at it in silence. After a while I ventured, “And Miss Vard--?” He opened the portfolio and put the sketch back, tying the strings with deliberation. Then, turning to relight his cigar at the lamp, he said: “She died last year, thank God.” End of Project Gutenberg’s The Greater Inclination, by Edith Wharton