Theodore Winthrop

“ It was my destiny first to be taught what love meant through you, and so to learn that I must never hope for love — for true love — in this waste misery of my ruined earthly life. I could not check you from loving me with that hesitating love you have given. I knew, Robert! I knew why you could not love me with frank abandonment. I felt the want in myself you dimly and far away perceived. I was conscious in my whole being of the taint that repelled you. “And yet sometimes — forgive me, for I hate myself, I loathe myself — I was willing to accept the success of my lie, my acted lie. ”

“ I might again deceive, and again see the same misery in another I have seen in you, — again see a look of love grow cold, — again see doubt creep in and murder faith. I cannot trust myself. I might love you with all my heart, and yet go miserably yielding to a temptation. And so good-bye to my life, and all my womanly hopes! “Ah Robert, if I could but have escaped that prying spirit of evil, — that one fatal being who mastered me with the first look, who saw the small germ of a bad tendency in me, and nurtured it! “But do not believe that I was to be so base as it may seem to my sister. ”

“ It is not for a dread of a lonely and sorrowful life that I die, but to save others from the contamination of my sin. “I shall not sully this innocent roof with my death. I die in a place where I have the right to enter. My death there shall atone for my crime there. It is near you, Robert, and I could wish, if you can forgive and pity me, that you first would find me, in the dark room next to yours, and be a little tender with the corpse my purified spirit will have abandoned. Good-bye! “EMMA DENMAN.” “Oh, Cecil!” I cried, “your sister!”
I sprang toward the door of my lumber-room. ”