t, and made her womanly and lovely once more.

She laid him down, and, taking off her shawl, made a pillow of it to
support his head. "It might have been hard, love," she said, as she felt
the faint pulsation strengthening at his heart. "You have made it easy
now."

She rose, and, turning from him, noticed the Purple Flask in the place
where she had left it since the fourth Pouring. "Ah," she thought,
quietly, "I had forgotten my best friend--I had forgotten that there is
more to pour in yet."

With a steady hand, with a calm, attentive face, she fed the funnel
for the fifth time. "Five minutes more," she said, when she had put the
Flask back, after a look at the clock.

She fell into thought--thought that only deepened the grave and gentle
composure of her face. "Shall I write him a farewell word?" she asked
herself. "Shall I tell him the truth before I leave him forever?"

Her little gold pencil-case hung with the other toys at her watch-chain.
After looking about her for a moment, she knelt over her husband and put
her hand into the breast-pocket of his coat.

His pocket-book was there. Some papers fell from it as she unfastened
the clasp. One of them was the letter which had come to him from Mr.
Brock's death-bed. She turned over the two sheets of note-paper on which
the rector had written the words that had now come true, and found the
last page of the last sheet a blank. On that page she wrote her farewell
words, kneeling at her husband's side.

"I am worse than the worst you can think of me. You have saved Armadale
by changing rooms with him to-night; and you have saved him from me. You
can guess now whose widow I should have claimed to be, if you had not
preserved his life; and you will know what a wretch you married when
you married the woman who writes these lines. Still, I had some innocent
moments, and then I loved you dearly. Forget me, my darling, in the love
of a better woman than I am. I might, perhaps, have been that better
woman myself, if I had not lived a miserable life before you met with
me. It matters little now. The one atonement I can make for all the
wrong I have done you is the atonement of my death. It is not hard
for me to die, now I know you will live. Even my wickedness has one
merit--it has not prospered. I have never been a happy woman."

She folded the letter again, and put it into his hand, to attract his
attention in that way when he came to himself. As she gently closed h