he says. There is still the same freedom from pain,
the same deadness to all sensation where the suffering was most acute.

My worst fears are realised: mortification has commenced. The doctor has
told him there is no hope. No words can describe his anguish. I can
write no more.

* * * * *

The next was still more distressing in the tenor of its contents. The
sufferer was fast approaching dissolution--dragged almost to the verge of
that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of
prayers or tears could save him. Nothing could comfort him now;
Hattersley's rough attempts at consolation were utterly in vain. The
world was nothing to him: life and all its interests, its petty cares and
transient pleasures, were a cruel mockery. To talk of the past was to
torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his
anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to his own regrets
and apprehensions. Often he dwelt with shuddering minuteness on the fate
of his perishing clay--the slow, piecemeal dissolution already invading
his frame: the shroud, the coffin, the dark, lonely grave, and all the
horrors of corruption.

'If I try,' said his afflicted wife, 'to divert him from these things--to
raise his thoughts to higher themes, it is no better:--"Worse and worse!"
he groans. "If there be really life beyond the tomb, and judgment after
death, how can I face it?"--I cannot do him any good; he will neither be
enlightened, nor roused, nor comforted by anything I say; and yet he
clings to me with unrelenting pertinacity--with a kind of childish
desperation, as if I could save him from the fate he dreads. He keeps me
night and day beside him. He is holding my left hand now, while I write;
he has held it thus for hours: sometimes quietly, with his pale face
upturned to mine: sometimes clutching my arm with violence--the big drops
starting from his forehead at the thoughts of what he sees, or thinks he
sees, before him. If I withdraw my hand for a moment it distresses him.

'"Stay with me, Helen," he says; "let me hold you so: it seems as if harm
could not reach me while you are here. But death will come--it is coming
now--fast, fast!--and--oh, if I could believe there was nothing after!"

'"Don't try to believe it, Arthur; there is joy and glory after, if you
will but try to reach it!"

'"What, for me?" he said, with something like a laugh. "Ar