ch
try to tempt hope but only make it hide in shame and dread. Now, the
memory of those occasions tormented me into accusing myself of having
wished her gone. But it was not so.

She had told me she had heart trouble; but she had confided to no one
that she knew it might bring on the end at any moment. She left a
letter, sealed and addressed to me:

Harvey--

I shall never have the courage to tell you, yet I feel you ought to
know. I think every one attributes to every one else less
shrewdness than he possesses. I know you have never given me the
credit of seeing that you did not love me. And you were so kind and
considerate and so patient with my moods that no doubt I should
have been deceived had I not known what love is. I think, to have
loved and to have been loved develops in a woman a sort of sixth
sense--sensitiveness to love. And that had been developed in me,
and when it never responded to your efforts to deceive me, I knew
you did not love me.

Well, neither did I love you, though I was able to hide it from
you. And it has often irritated me that you were so unobservant.
You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, which have
seemed causeless.

I admired you from the first time we met. I have liked you, I have
been proud of you, I would not have been the wife of any other man
in the world, I would not have had any other father for my
children. But I have kept on loving the man I loved before I met
you.

Why? I don't know. I despised him for his weaknesses. I should
never have married him, though mother and Ed both feared I would. I
think I loved him because I knew he loved me. That is the way it is
with women--they seldom love independently. Men like to love; women
like to be loved. And, poor, unworthy creature that he was, still
he would have died for me, though God had denied him the strength
to live for me. But all that God gave him--the power to love--he
gave me. And so he was different in my eyes from what he was in any
one's else in the world. And I loved him.

I don't tell you this because I feel regret or remorse. I don't;
there never was a wife truer than I, for I put him completely
aside. I tell you, because I want you to remember me right after
I'm gone, Harvey dear. You may remember how I was silly and jealous
of you, and think I am mistaken abou