begged with her dying breath for my forgiveness!

A cowardly desire to lose consciousness ran through me, to forget
myself, to hide my shame with her in death; yet, even while this was
so, I sought most desperately through the depths of my anguished pity
to find some hint, if only the tiniest seed, of love--and found it
not. . . . The rest belonged to things unrealized. . . .

I remember a hand being laid upon me. I lifted my head which had
fallen close against her cheek. The doctor stood beside me, his grave
and kindly face bent low. He spoke some gentle words. I saw him
replacing the needle in its little leathern case, unused.

Marion was dead, her deep secret undisclosed. That which she yearned
to tell me was something which, in her brief period of devotion, she
had lived, had faithfully acted out, yet herself only dimly aware of
why it had to be. The solution of this problem of unrequited love lay
at last within her grasp; of a love that only asked to give of its
unquenched and unquenchable store, undismayed by the total absence of
response.

She passed from the world of speech and action with this intense
desire unsatisfied, and at the very moment--as with a drowning man
who sees his past--when the solution lay ready to her hand. She saw
clearly, she understood, she burned to tell me. Upon the edge of full
disclosure, she was gone, leaving me alone with my aching pity and
with my shame of unawakened love.

"I have failed, but I shall try again. . . ."