"It's a queer mix-up, isn't it?" he said, after a pause. "Most people
would say that I've ruined your life. If it hadn't been for me, you
might have married."
"No, dear," she replied. "I've had a very full and happy life."
The nurse came into the room to signify the end of the visit, and found
them hand in hand like lovers. He laughed.
"Nurse," said he, "you see a dying but a jolly happy old man!"
Two days afterwards Roger Orme died. On the afternoon of the funeral,
Miss Winifred Goode sat in the old garden in the shade of the clipped
yew, and looked at the house in which she had been born, and in which
she had passed her sixty years of life, and at the old wistaria beneath
which he had kissed her forty years ago. She smiled and murmured aloud:
"No, I would not have had a single thing different."