to say you will curse me. Oh, how can I tell it! Yet I can
not sleep in my grave with this burden on my soul."

He certainly thought she was delirious, this poor, patient, toil-worn
soul, speaking so incoherently of sin; she, so tender-hearted--she
could not even have hurt a sparrow.

"I can promise you my full pardon, Mrs. Corliss," he said, soothingly;
"no matter on what grounds the grievance may be."

For a moment she looked at him incredulously.

"You do not know what you say. You do not understand," she muttered,
fixing her fast-dimming eyes strangely upon him.

"Do not give yourself any uneasiness upon that score, Mrs. Corliss,"
he said, gently; "try to think of something else. Is there anything
you would like to have done for you?"

"Yes," she replied, in a voice so hoarse and changed he could scarcely
recognize it was her who had spoken; "when I tell you all, promise me
you will not curse me; for I have sinned against you so bitterly that
you will cry out to Heaven asking why I did not die long years ago,
that the terrible secret I have kept so long might have been wrung
from my lips."

"Surely her ravings were taking a strange freak," he thought to
himself; "yet he would be patient with her and humor her strange
fancy."

The quiet, gentle expression did not leave his face, and she took
courage.

"Master," she said, clasping her hands nervously together, "would it
pain you to speak of the sweet, golden-haired young girl-bride who
died on that terrible stormy night nearly seventeen years ago?"

She saw his care-worn face grow white, and the lines of pain deepen
around his mouth.

"That is the most painful of all subjects to me," he said, slowly.
"You know how I have suffered since that terrible night," he said
shudderingly. "The double loss of my sweet young wife and her little
babe has nearly driven me mad. I am a changed man, the weight of the
cross I have had to bear has crushed me. I live on, but my heart is
buried in the grave of my sweet, golden-haired Evalia and her little
child. I repeat, it is a painful subject, still I will listen to what
you have to say. I believe I owe my life to your careful nursing, when
I was stricken with the brain fever that awful time."

"It would have been better if I had let you die then, rather than live
to inflict the blow which my words will give you. Oh, master!" she
implored, "I did not know then what I did was a sin. I feared to tell
you lest the shock m