loved. There's a great fitness in its having been kept for the last. After this nothing would have been tolerable. I shall now have a month of it, I hope, and I shall not have a chance to be disenchanted. There's one thing!"—and here, pausing, he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before him,—"I wish it were possible you should be with me to the end."
"I promise you," I said, "to leave you only at your own request. But it must be on condition of your omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavor of mortality. The end! Perhaps it's the beginning."
He shook his head. "You don't know me. It's a long story. I'm incurably ill."
"I know you a little. I have a strong suspicion that your illness is in great measure a matter of mind and spirits. All that you 've told me is but another way of saying that you have lived hitherto in yourself. The tenement's haunted! Live abroad! Take an interest!"
He looked at me for a moment with his sad weak eyes. Then with a faint smile: "Don't cut down a man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it. I'm bankrupt."
"O, health is money!" I said. "Get well, and the rest will take care of itself. I'm interested in your claim."
