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Author of "The Voice of Euphemia"
OUTSIDE, the winter wind howls its way across the prison walls and beats against my casement. The cell is cold and damp. The smoking lamp intensifies the shadows that lurk above me, beneath me, about me. The march of the death watch past my door is the only sound within this dark, dank hole. I am alone, alone; but it is not loneliness I fear. It is Lucretia—the Lucretia I loved, betrayed and murdered. God! I feel the grip of her power reaching from the world beyond, wreaking its terrible vengeance. Her eyes, those limpid, mild blue eyes of hers! How they search my very soul tonight! How they have always searched me, accused me, cursed me! Lucretia! I must write to break the spell. I must write or I shall go mad, mad; and it is madness I fear, not the death that awaits me. Lucretia, Lucretia, spare me! I have told it all. I will tell it again. Will that not be atonement sufficient? God in heaven, who gave me the sinister power that wrought my destruction and Lucretia's, hold off for tonight the spirit that possesses me! Let me forget! For a moment let me forget!
While I write, I am calmer. Lucretia does not reach me. How many times by the ghastly light of this lamp I have written the story, to destroy it the next morning! At day¬ break tomorrow death will bring surcease; so tonight I write for the last time, and the record will remain to purge my soul of its guilt. I write to speed by the hours that must pass before I am led to the death chamber and set free from this anguish. What lies beyond I do not know, but it will not be this. Merciful God, it cannot be this?
What a simple, happy thing was that youth of mine spent in the little town that progress passed by! In the center of my life, as far back as I can remember, was Lucretia. A boxwood hedge separated our ancestral homes, but nothing came between our love. Here in the midnight quiet of this cell, it does not seem possible that the man who committed the crime for which I am to die at daybreak could once have been the boy who loved Lucretia with all the purity of his boy heart. And yet in that boy lay the roots of the power that has brought me to this wretched
end. All my life I had loved and
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