m her husband guided her
hand to the place under his pillow where the key was hidden. She opened
the desk, and disclosed inside some small sheets of manuscript pinned
together. "These?" she inquired, producing them.

"Yes," he said. "You can go now."

The Scotchman sitting at the writing-table, the doctor stirring a
stimulant mixture in a corner, looked at each other with an anxiety in
both their faces which they could neither of them control. The words
that banished the wife from the room were spoken. The moment had come.

"You can go now," said Mr. Armadale, for the second time.

She looked at the child, established comfortably on the bed, and an ashy
paleness spread slowly over her face. She looked at the fatal
letter which was a sealed secret to her, and a torture of jealous
suspicion--suspicion of that other woman who had been the shadow and
the poison of her life--wrung her to the heart. After moving a few
steps from the bedside, she stopped, and came back again. Armed with the
double courage of her love and her despair, she pressed her lips on
her dying husband's cheek, and pleaded with him for the last time. Her
burning tears dropped on his face as she whispered to him: "Oh, Allan,
think how I have loved you! think how hard I have tried to make you
happy! think how soon I shall lose you! Oh, my own love! don't, don't
send me away!"

The words pleaded for her; the kiss pleaded for her; the recollection
of the love that had been given to him, and never returned, touched the
heart of the fast-sinking man as nothing had touched it since the day
of his marriage. A heavy sigh broke from him. He looked at her, and
hesitated.

"Let me stay," she whispered, pressing her face closer to his.

"It will only distress you," he whispered back.

"Nothing distresses me, but being sent away from _you_!"

He waited. She saw that he was thinking, and waited too.

"If I let you stay a little--?"

"Yes! yes!"

"Will you go when I tell you?"

"I will."

"On your oath?"

The fetters that bound his tongue seemed to be loosened for a moment in
the great outburst of anxiety which forced that question to his lips. He
spoke those startling words as he had spoken no words yet.

"On my oath!" she repeated, and, dropping on her knees at the bedside,
passionately kissed his hand. The two strangers in the room turned their
heads away by common consent. In the silence that followed, the one
sound stirring was the small sound