phrases: "I was a singer. . . in the Temple. I sang--men--into evil.
You . . . I sang into . . . evil."

There was a moment's pause, as a spasm of inexplicable pain passed
through my heart like fire, and a sense of haunting things whereof no
conscious memory remained came over me. The scene about me wavered
before my eyes as if it would disappear.

"Yet you came to me when I lay dying at the last," I caught her thin
clear whisper. "You said, 'Turn to God!'"

The whisper died away. The darkness flowed back upon my mind and
thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead.
The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning
away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the
driver made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a
sign--when Marion's low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind
than a living voice, rose into the still evening air:

"I have failed. And I shall try again."

She gazed up at me with that patient, generous love that seemed
inexhaustible, and hardly knowing what to answer, nor how to comfort
her in that afflicting moment, I bent lower--or, rather, she drew my
ear closer to her lips. I think her great desire just then was to
utter her own thought more fully before she passed. Certainly it was
no avowal or consolation from myself she sought.

"Your forgiveness," I heard distinctly, "I need your full
forgiveness."