Much as you have wronged them, they will
forgive you; and Heaven is not less merciful than they!"
"They may; for I have striven to atone. In my house there are
proofs and papers that will put them in possession of all, and
more than all, they have lost. But life is a burden of torture
I will bear no longer. The death of him who died for me this
night is the crowning tragedy of my miserable life; and if my
hour were not at hand, I should not have told you this."
"But you have not told me the fearful cause of no much guilt and
suffering. What is behind that mask?"
"Would you, too, see?" she asked, in a terrible voice, "and die?"
"I have told you it is not in my nature to die easily, and it is
something far stronger than mere curiosity makes me ask."
"Be it so! The sky is growing red with day-dawn, and I shall
never see the sun rise more, for I am already plague-struck!"
That sweetest of all voices ceased. The white hands removed the
mask, and the floating coils of hair, and revealed, to Sir
Norman's horror-struck gaze, the grisly face and head, and the
hollow eye-sockets, the grinning mouth, and fleshless cheeks of a
skeleton!
He saw it but for one fearful instant - the next, she had thrown
up both arms, and leaped headlong into the loathly plague-pit.
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