poke to her
softly, in the hope of producing a change.

The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness. She
suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet.

"I must submit, Marian, as well as I can," she said. "My new life has
its hard duties, and one of them begins to-day."

As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which her
sketching materials were placed, gathered them together carefully, and
put them in a drawer of her cabinet. She locked the drawer and brought
the key to me.

"I must part from everything that reminds me of him," she said. "Keep
the key wherever you please--I shall never want it again."

Before I could say a word she had turned away to her book-case, and had
taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright's drawings.
She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume fondly in her
hands--then lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

"Oh, Laura! Laura!" I said, not angrily, not reprovingly--with nothing
but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my heart.

"It is the last time, Marian," she pleaded. "I am bidding it good-bye
for ever."

She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened her
hair. It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and shoulders,
and dropped round her, far below her waist. She separated one long,
thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and pinned it carefully, in the
form of a circle, on the first blank page of the album. The moment it
was fastened she closed the volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands.

"You write to him and he writes to you," she said. "While I am alive,
if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never say I am
unhappy. Don't distress him, Marian, for my sake, don't distress him.
If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his
drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no harm, when I am gone, in
telling him that I put it there with my own hands. And say--oh,
Marian, say for me, then, what I can never say for myself--say I loved
him!"

She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in my
ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost broke my
heart to hear. All the long restraint she had imposed on herself gave
way in that first last outburst of tenderness. She broke from me with
hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm of
sobs and tears that shook her from head to foot.

I