did you think of the two lines that I wrote in it?"

"I realized at once that the woman to whom you had given the volume
must have been quite outside the ordinary category, for I could not take
those two lines as a mere empty compliment."

"You were right. That woman was an angel. See, read this letter." And he
handed to me a paper which seemed to have been many times reread.

I opened it, and this is what it contained:

"MY DEAR ARMAND:--I have received your letter. You are still good, and
I thank God for it. Yes, my friend, I am ill, and with one of those
diseases that never relent; but the interest you still take in me makes
my suffering less. I shall not live long enough, I expect, to have the
happiness of pressing the hand which has written the kind letter I have
just received; the words of it would be enough to cure me, if anything
could cure me. I shall not see you, for I am quite near death, and you
are hundreds of leagues away. My poor friend! your Marguerite of old
times is sadly changed. It is better perhaps for you not to see her
again than to see her as she is. You ask if I forgive you; oh, with all
my heart, friend, for the way you hurt me was only a way of proving the
love you had for me. I have been in bed for a month, and I think so much
of your esteem that I write every day the journal of my life, from the
moment we left each other to the moment when I shall be able to write
no longer. If the interest you take in me is real, Armand, when you come
back go and see Julie Duprat. She will give you my journal. You will
find in it the reason and the excuse for what has passed between us.
Julie is very good to me; we often talk of you together. She was there
when your letter came, and we both cried over it.

"If you had not sent me any word, I had told her to give you those
papers when you returned to France. Do not thank me for it. This daily
looking back on the only happy moments of my life does me an immense
amount of good, and if you will find in reading it some excuse for the
past. I, for my part, find a continual solace in it. I should like to
leave you something which would always remind you of me, but everything
here has been seized, and I have nothing of my own.

"Do you understand, my friend? I am dying, and from my bed I can hear
a man walking to and fro in the drawing-room; my creditors have put him
there to see that nothing is taken away, and that nothing remains to
me in case I do not die.