before the
appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my
lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to--'

"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled
dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him
so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.'

"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every
word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth
and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief
and love.

"'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,' she repeated, a
little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent
you to me. I feel I can speak to you--and oh! I must speak. I want
you--you who have heard his last words--to know I have been worthy of
him. . . . It is not pride. . . . Yes! I am proud to know I understood
him better than anyone on earth--he told me so himself. And since his
mother died I have had no one--no one--to--to--'

"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had
given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care
of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager
examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the
certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard
that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He
wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had
not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer
that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out
there.

"'. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?' she was
saying. 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them.' She looked
at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and
the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all
the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever
heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the
wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible
words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the
threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know!'
she cried.

"'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but
bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and
saving illu