“Emma, Emma!” cried Cecil Dreeme.
She did not speak,—that dead form had given up its last words in the letter to me. The sickly odor of a deadly drug filled the room, mingling with the perfume I had noticed. She seemed to have been some hours dead, and sitting there alone, unforgiven by man.
We stood looking at her. It was pitiful. Her beauty wasted thus! Her life self-condemned to this drear death, lest her soul perish with the taint of sin!
I kissed her forehead; then pressed my lips chilled to Cecil’s cheek.
“She is our sister, Cecil,” I whispered.
“Our sister, Robert,—our sister, forgiven and beloved.”
And so with clasped hands we knelt beside our sister, and in silence prayed for strength in the great battle with sin and sorrow, through the solemn days of our life together.
THE END.
About the Author
Theodore Winthrop (1828–1861) was a lawyer, writer, and world traveler. Cecil Dreeme is a semi-autobiographical novel, set in Washington Square and at the New York University building where Winthrop had once been a lodger. He is also the author of the novels John Brent and Edwin Brothertoft and the travel narratives The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air.
Peter Coviello is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the editor of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda during the War (2004) and the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (2005) and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2013).
WASHINGTON MEWS BOOKS is an imprint that celebrates everything New York City epitomizes, from the literary to the profane, the forgotten to the renowned, the local to the global. An eclectic mix of rediscovered fiction, urban histories, and engagements with popular culture, Washington Mews Books embraces the cosmopolitan nature of America’s most vibrant city.
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