You will say I am a scoundrel. It was life and youth crying out in me and driving me away from Marusia.

I lay down beside her, and she spoke to me in a wounded, soft voice that came as if from the depths of the night. She said:

— Go away, my life, go away. I want to keep you until the end.

One day the doctor came and examined her minutely, then laughed and joked with her, then asked the nurse, Leonie, to accompany him to my study in the next room.

I followed them. He said, taking my hand between his hands:

— My friend, the case is a grievous one. There is no hope of recovery, and I see no glimmer of hope. Perhaps you will want to consult other doctors than myself.

After I had seen the doctor to the door and returned to Marusia's chamber, I found her flung upon the floor in a deep faint.

And the days went by again, each like the last — I tending the patient and taking my meals with Leonie, that cold woman who never exchanged a word with me. As for my wife, she lived through hours of strangled weeping, broken by hours of anger or of long silence, and a shrinking into a listless selfishness that cared for nothing but the hours of the medicine, the injections, and the meals — craving them, then pushing them away in bitter despair.

And feeling awoke in her. She would cling to me in the nights of sleeplessness and fever and beg love of me in that poor wounded voice.

The faint blue light coming from the abat-jour cast a blue halo over a body that had become half carrion, and I felt on my face the breath of death when her arms encircled me in despair and terror.

The end drew near. She called me at dawn and asked for the medicine, and I tilted the bottle as usual and put a few drops

of it into the glass. She took it and drank what was in it at one draught, and I looked at her greenish face — and she opened her eyes and burst into a wanton laugh and said:

— I saw everything. I want you to know that I saw everything!

She was, in the bed, a heap of terror; she had laid her hand on her breast, and her shoulder bone had slipped out of her nightgown. She went on:

— I want you to know that I saw you the moment you poured me, instead of the few drops, a

fatal dose. I did not stop your hand, because I had come to long for release. I knew from the beginning that you love her. I heard the doctor's sentence upon me the day you found me in the faint. I heard, and I saw through the crack of the half-open door, the look of joy and deliverance you exchanged with Leonie. And I knew that she would take my place, and that you wanted me to go quickly.

And I clung to life, and in my ignorance I thought I could rekindle the extinguished ember of life within me. And I pressed

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