And just when all is finished, to be taken away and thrust into the grave.
It is so cruel!" And she began to weep. Her emotion brought on a violent
paroxysm, which, when she recovered from it, had produced one of those
startling changes of mind that are sometimes witnessed before
death,--changes whereby the whole character of a life seems to undergo
solemn transformation. The hard will becomes gentle, the proud meek, the
frivolous earnest. That awful moment when the things of earth pass away
like dissolving scenes, leaving death visible on the background by the
glare that shoots up in the last flicker of life's lamp.

And when she lifted her haggard face from my shoulder, and heard my
pitying, soothing voice, it was not the grief of a trifler at the loss of
fondled toys that spoke in the fallen lines of her lip, in the woe of her
pleading eyes.

"So this is death," she said. "I feel it hurrying on. I must speak. I
promised Mr. C---- that I would. Forgive me, can you--can you? That
letter--that letter to Lilian Ashleigh, I wrote it! Oh, do not look at me
so terribly; I never thought it could do such evil! And am I not punished
enough? I truly believed when I wrote that Miss Ashleigh was deceiving
you, and once I was silly enough to fancy that you might have liked me.
But I had another motive; I had been so poor all my life--I had become
rich unexpectedly; I set my heart on this house--I had always fancied
it--and I thought if I could prevent Miss Ashleigh marrying you, and scare
her and her mother from coming back to L----, I could get the house. And
I did get it. What for?--to die. I had not been here a week before I got
the hurt that is killing me--a fall down the stairs,--coming out of this
very room; the stairs had been polished. If I had stayed in my old
lodging, it would not have happened. Oh, say you forgive me! Say, say
it, even if you do not feel you can! Say it!" And the miserable woman