lt that death was at hand to unloose them. But
it was too late; even then she had only a few hours to live. By her
bedside, where I learned to know the worth of a devoted heart, my nature
underwent a final change. I was still at an age when tears are shed.
During those last days, while the precious life yet lingered, my
tears, my words, and everything I did bore witness to my heartstricken
repentance. The meanness and pettiness of the society in which I had
moved, the emptiness and selfishness of women of fashion, had taught me
to wish for and to seek an elect soul, and now I had found it--too late.
I was weary of lying words and of masked faces; counterfeit passion
had set me dreaming; I had called on love; and now I beheld love lying
before me, slain by my own hands, and had no power to keep it beside me,
no power to keep what was so wholly mine.

"The experience of four years had taught me to know my own real
character. My temperament, the nature of my imagination, my religious
principles, which had not been eradicated, but had rather lain
dormant; my turn of mind, my heart that only now began to make itself
felt--everything within me led me to resolve to fill my life with
the pleasures of affection, to replace a lawless love by family
happiness--the truest happiness on earth. Visions of close and dear
companionship appealed to me but the more strongly for my wanderings
in the wilderness, my grasping at pleasures unennobled by thought or
feeling. So though the revolution within me was rapidly effected, it
was permanent. With my southern temperament, warped by the life I led in
Paris, I should certainly have come to look without pity on an unhappy
girl betrayed by her lover; I should have laughed at the story if it
had been told me by some wag in merry company (for with us in France
a clever bon mot dispels all feelings of horror at a crime), but all
sophistries were silenced in the presence of this angelic creature,
against whom I could bring no least word of reproach. There stood her
coffin, and my child, who did not know that I had murdered his mother,
and smiled at me.

"She died. She died happy when she saw that I loved her, and that this
new love was due neither to pity nor to the ties that bound us together.
Never shall I forget her last hours. Love had been won back, her mind
was at rest about her child, and happiness triumphed over suffering.
The comfort and luxury about her, the merriment of her child, who