I shifted my knees so that she might lie

more easily a little.

“God’s music!” she cried aloud with startling abruptness; then,

lowering her voice again and smiling sadly as though something came

back to her that she would fain forget, she added slowly, with

something of mournful emphasis:

“I was a singer…”

As though a flash of light had passed, some inner darkness was cleft

asunder in me. Some heaviness shifted from my brain. It seemed the

years, the centuries, turned over like a wind-blown page. And out of

some hidden inmost part of me involuntary words rose instantly:

“You sang God’s music then… ”

The strange, unbidden sentence stirred her. Her head moved

slightly; she smiled. Gazing into my eyes intently, as though to dispel

a mist that shrouded both our minds, she went on in a whisper that yet

was startlingly distinct, though with little pauses drawn out between

the phrases: “I was a singer… in the Temple. I sang—men—into evil. You... I sang into… evil.”

There was a moment’s pause, as a spasm of inexplicable pain passed

through my heart like fire, and a sense of haunting things whereof no

conscious memory remained came over me. The scene about me wavered

before my eyes as if it would disappear.

“Yet you came to me when I lay dying at the last,” I caught her thin

clear whisper. “You said, ‘Turn to God!’”

The whisper died away. The darkness flowed back upon my mind and

thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead.

The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning

away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the driver

made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a sign—when

Marion’s low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind than a

living voice, rose into the still evening air:

“I have failed. And I shall try again.”

She gazed up at me with that patient, generous love that seemed

inexhaustible, and hardly knowing what to answer, nor how to comfort

her in that afflicting moment, I bent lower—or, rather, she drew my

ear closer to her lips. I think her great desire just then was to utter

her own thought more fully before she passed. Certainly it was no

avowal or consolation from myself she sought.

“Your forgiveness,” I heard distinctly, “I need your full

forgiveness.”

It was for me a terrible and poignant moment. The emptiness of my

pity betrayed itself too mercilessly for me to bear; yet, before my

bewilderment enabled me to frame an answer, she went on hurriedly,

though with a faultless certainty: the meaning to her was clear as day:

“Born of love… the only true forgiveness….”

A film formed slowly. Her eyes began to close, her breath died off

into a sigh; she smiled, but her head sank lower with her fading

strength. And her final words went by me in that sigh:

“Yet love in you lies unawakened still… and I must try again… .”

There was one more effort, painful with unexpressed fulfilment. A

flicker of awful yearning took her paling eyes. Life seemed to stammer,

pause, then flush as with this last deep impulse to yield a secret she

discerned for the first time fully, in the very act of passing out. The

face, with its soft loveliness, turned grey in death. Upon the edge of

a great disclosure—she was gone.

I remember that for a space of time there was silence all about us.

The doctor still kept his back to us, the driver had ceased his

wretched hammering, I heard the wind in the poplar and the hum of

insects. A bird sang loudly on a branch above; it seemed miles away,

across an empty world…. Then, of a sudden, I became aware that the

weight of the head and shoulders had dreadfully increased.