I had the poison in my hand a moment ago, ready to take, when I suddenly felt someone approaching me stealthily from behind, and glancing up quickly at the mirror I saw ... my mother! Her face, hideous and ghastly as it had been in her last illness, was reflected in the glass, peering over my shoulder! I sprang up and confronted her,----she was gone! And now I am shivering with cold, and I feel a chill dampness on my forehead,--mechanically I have soaked a handkerchief with perfume from one of the silver bottles on the dressing table, and have passed it across my temples to help me recover from this sick swooning sensation. To _recover_!--how foolish of me, seeing I am about to die. I do not believe in ghosts,--yet I could have sworn my mother was actually present just now,--of course it was an optical delusion of my own feverish brain. The strong scent on my handkerchief reminds me of Paris--I can see the shop where I bought this particular perfume, and the well-dressed doll of a man who served me, with his little waxed moustache, and his indefinable French manner of conveying a speechless personal compliment while making out a bill.... Laughing at this recollection, I see my face radiate in the glass,--my eyes flash into vivid lustre, and the dimples near my lips come and go, giving my expression an enchanting sweetness. Yet in a few hours this loveliness will be destroyed,--and in a few days, the worms will twine where the smile is now! * * * * * An idea has come upon me that perhaps I ought to say a prayer. It would be hypocritical,--but conventional. To die fashionably, one ought to concede a few words to the church. And yet ... to kneel down with clasped hands and tell an inactive, unsympathetic, selfish, paid community called the church, that I am going to kill myself for the sake of love and love's despair, and that therefore I humbly implore its forgiveness for the act seems absurd,--as absurd as to tell the same thing to a non-existent Deity. I suppose the scientists do not think what a strange predicament their advanced theories put the human mind in at the hour of death. They forget that on the brink of the grave, thoughts come that will not be gainsaid, and that cannot be appeased by a learned thesis.... However I will not pray,--it would seem to myself cowardly that I who have never said my prayers since I was a child, should run over them now in a foolish babbling attempt to satisfy the powers invisible,--I could not, out of sheer association, appeal to Mr Swinburne's 'crucified carrion'! Besides I do not believe in the powers invisible at all,--I feel that once outside this life, 'the rest' as Hamlet said 'is silence.' * * * * *