And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote about--what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.
And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see, too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I had always the little hope that some day I might give you these myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and that you should never know.
I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself; I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not to, if you think justly of it all.
Of course you will be sorry for me--I am afraid that I want you to be _sorry_; but don't be too sad. I am so much happier in dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I have felt so much, I have lived so much--more perhaps than many people in a whole lifetime.
See the gift you have given _me_, dearest one. Good-bye. Good-bye.
It was over,--the last link with life, her last word spoken or written,--and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.
With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.
Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really over; she really was dead.
She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down the stairs.
The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper Mayfair sort--a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's imagination--an imagination that no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for they, too, were seen from across that abyss.