All feelings, but a child's feelings, were comparatively new to me, and here, at one moment, I had put into my hand the plummet that sounded hell; anguish, remorse, fear--a woman's heart in hopeless pain.

For I will not believe that any child, that any woman, had ever loved more absolutely, more passionately, than I had loved the man who lay there dead before me.

But I cannot talk about what I felt in those moments; all that concerns what I write is the external.
The--coffin was in the middle of the room, where the table ordinarily stood--where my chair had been that night, when he told me his story.
Surely if I sinned, in thought, in word, _that_ night, I paid its full atonement, _this_.

Candles stood on a small table at the head of where he lay, and many flowers were about the room.

The smell of verbena-leaves filled the air: a branch of them was in a vase that some one had put beside his coffin.