utiful women, but that none of them save
myself had ever had the power to move your inmost heart-strings.
Ah, low was your voice and eloquent your eyes that hour, and I
forgot,--for a moment I forgot--everything but this pure love;
and the heartbeat it called up and the hope, never to be realized--that
I should live to hear you repeat the same sweet words in our
old age, in just such a tone and with just such a look. I was
innocent at that moment, innocent and good. I am willing that
you should remember me as I was that night.

"When I think of him lying cold and dead in the grave I myself
dug for him, my heart is like stone, but when I think of you--

"I am afraid to die; but I am more afraid of failing in courage.
I shall have the pistol tied to me; this will make it seem
inevitable to use it. Oh! that the next twenty-four hours could
be blotted out of time! Such horror can not be. I was born for
joy and gaiety; yet no dismal depth of misery and fear has been
spared me! But all on account of my own act. I do not accuse
God; I do not accuse man; I only accuse myself, and my thoughtless
grasping after pleasure.

"I want Cora to read this as well as you. She must know me dead as
she never knew me living. But I can not tell her that I have left
a confession behind me. She must come upon it unexpectedly, just
as I mean you to do. Only thus can it reach either of you with any
power. If I could but think of some excuse for sending her to the
book where I propose to hide it! that would give her a chance of
reading it before you do, and this would be best. She may know how
to prepare or comfort you--I hope so. Cora is a noble woman, but
the secret which kept my thoughts in such a whirl has held us apart.

"You did what I asked. You found a place for Rancher's waiter in
the volunteer corps. Surprised as you were at the interest I
expressed in him, you honored my first request and said nothing.
Would you have shown the same anxious eagerness if you had known why
I whispered those few words to him from the carriage door? Why I
could neither rest nor sleep till he and the other boy were safely
out of town?

"I must leave a line for you to show to people if they should wonder
why I killed myself so soon after my seemingly happy marriage. You
will find it in the same book with this letter. Some one will tell
you to look in the book--I can not write any more.

"I can not help writing. It is all that conn