"How amazing that I should tell you, calmly tell you, isn't it?" she said. "And yet I can't feel it as amazing. Nothing could amaze me. I seem to have passed beyond any feeling of that sort. But since I am so really dead already, that I can tell you, you must respect my confidence in you. You must not try to prevent me. I trust you."
Again she closed her eyes. "Thanks. It is almost a comfort to be able to tell some one. I know now how fearfully lonely I have been. And yet--I wish I hadn't met you--or I will wish it. Now I can wish nothing, and feel nothing--except that you are there, alive, and that I am going to die. But it will be harder to do now. Everything seems so vague, everything seems left behind. The very sorrow that makes me do it seems so far away--like a dream. I can't go through all the realization again, and when I do it now, it will seem to be for something unreal." Her voice trailed off.
"Are you sure you are going to do it?" Haldicott asked presently.
They spoke very slowly, with long pauses, as though a monotony of leisure were about them; as though, in some quiet, dim place of departed spirits, time had ceased.
"Yes; quite sure. I have bought it--the poison--I had a doctor's prescription--I have thought it all out carefully. It's in the top drawer of my dressing-table."
"Is it an irremediable sorrow that makes life impossible, or is it life itself, in general, that you can't go on with?"
Again a long, long silence grew; every moment, Haldicott felt, a drop in the deep cup of oblivion that, unconsciously, she was drinking, that would make the past more and more unreal, until from oblivion she woke into the sane world of struggle and life.
"Yet you are so young," he said at last, "with everything before you--real joys as well as--forgive me!--realer sorrows; they would balance better if you would live a little longer. You know, if you waited for just one year, let us say, you would look back with wonder at this, with thankfulness that you hadn't."
"Perhaps," she said. "Only I don't want to live that year."
"And when were--when are you going to do it?"
"This evening. I had meant to do it long before this. Mamma is away. There could be no better time. Besides, it must be this evening. I've written."