n, and even before it knew it, that life found itself quickly deeper
and more hopelessly in the tremendous shadow into which it was being
inexorably engulfed.

He himself knew nothing now of those who stood about the bed, awe-struck
and silent, looking down upon him; he himself sensed nothing of the
harsh convulsive breathing, and of all the other grim outer signs of the
struggle. But still, deep within, that combat of resistance to death
waged as desperately, as vividly, as ever.

* * * * *

A door opened, and at the sudden noise the dissolving life
recrystallized for one brief instant, and in that instant the dying man
knew that Dr. Hunt was standing beside his bed, and heard him say, in a
slow, solemn voice, sounding muffled and hollow, as though from far away
and through an empty space, "Colonel Singelsby has just died."

Then the cord, momentarily drawn tense, was relaxed with a snap, and
the last smoky spark was quenched in blackness.

Dr. Hunt's fingers were resting lightly upon the wrist. As the last deep
quivering breath expired with a quavering sigh, he laid the limp hand
back upon the bed, and then, before he arose, gently closed the stiff
eyelids over the staring glassy eyes, and set the gaping jaws back again
into a more seemly repose.

V.

_So all this first part of the Parable had, as I read it, a reflected
image of what was real and actual; of what belonged to the world of men
as I knew that world. The people of whom it spoke moved and lived, maybe
not altogether as real men of flesh and blood move and live, but
nevertheless with a certain life of their own--images of what was real.
All these things, I say (excepting perhaps the last), were clear and
plain enough after a certain fashion, but that which followed showed
those two of whom the story was written--the good man and the wicked
man--stripped of all their outer husk of fleshly reality, and walking
and talking not as men of flesh and blood, but as men in the spirit._

_So, though I knew that which I was reading might indeed be as true, and
perhaps truer, than that other which I had read, and though I knew that
to such a state I myself must come, and that as these two suffered, I
myself must some time suffer in the same kind, if not in the same
degree, nevertheless it was all strangely unreal, and being set apart
from that which I knew, was like life as seen in a dream._

_Yet let it not be thought that thi