“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long, long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last--love!”
There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was so self-absorbed. And you--you fed my vanity, never insisted upon yourself.”
“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to you what I have been.”
“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”
“With this little candle? No, no, dear--_my_ dear. You will be a great man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think--yes, I feel that--that I shall know and thrill.”
Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently he called the nurse.
The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went nearer.
“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red ribbons at your neck.”
There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long streamers of blood. She was dead.
He left her at Asheville as she wished--“where I have been happiest and where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed his past and made his plans for the future.
As to the past he had only one regret--that he had not learned to appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had been due entirely to himself--to his inertia, his willingness to seize any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future--work, work with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.
At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house--at their windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.