, what you will--but it is so. There are now two
journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry him--the journey
to the church. If the profanation of myself is more than I can bear--the
journey to the grave!"

Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines:

"My choice is made. If the cruel law will let you, lay me with my father
and mother in the churchyard at home. Farewell, my love! Be always
innocent; be always happy. If Frank ever asks about me, say I died
forgiving him. Don't grieve long for me, Norah--I am not worth it."

She sealed the letter, and addressed it to her sister. The tears
gathered in her eyes as she laid it on the table. She waited until her
sight was clear again, and then took the banknotes once more from the
little bag in her bosom. After wrapping them in a sheet of note paper,
she wrote Captain Wragge's name on the inclosure, and added these words
below it: "Lock the door of my room, and leave me till my sister comes.
The money I promised you is in this. You are not to blame; it is my
fault, and mine only. If you have any friendly remembrance of me, be
kind to your wife for my sake."

After placing the inclosure by the letter to Norah, she rose and looked
round the room. Some few little things in it were not in their places.
She set them in order, and drew the curtains on either side at the head
of her bed. Her own dress was the next object of her scrutiny. It was
all as neat, as pure, as prettily arranged as ever. Nothing about her
was disordered but her hair. Some tresses had fallen loose on one side
of her head; she carefully put them back in their places with the help
of her glass. "How pale I look!" she thought, with a faint smile. "Shall
I be paler still when they find me in the morning?"

She went straight to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and took
it out. The bottle was so small that it lay easily in the palm of her
hand. She let it remain there for a little while, and stood looking at
it.

"DEATH!" she said. "In this drop of brown drink--DEATH!"

As the words passed her lips, an agony of unutterable horror seized on
her in an instant. She crossed the room unsteadily, with a maddening
confusion in her head, with a suffocating anguish at her heart. She
caught at the table to support herself. The faint clink of the bottle,
as it fell harmlessly from her loosened grasp and rolled against some
porcelain object on the table, struck through her brain like the stroke
of