s
so dull; she wanted to get away. Six months later I had saved a little
money by taking in extra work after office hours, and through the
influence of a friend of my father's I obtained a petty appointment in
Paris. I started off to settle there with the dear little woman so
that she might cry no more. During the night, which we spent in the
third-class railway carriage, the seats being very hard, I took her in
my arms in order that she might sleep.

That was the past, and now I had just died on the narrow couch of a
Paris lodginghouse, and my wife was crouching on the floor, crying
bitterly. The white light before my left eye was growing dim, but I
remembered the room perfectly. On the left there was a chest of drawers,
on the right a mantelpiece surmounted by a damaged clock without a
pendulum, the hands of which marked ten minutes past ten. The window
overlooked the Rue Dauphine, a long, dark street. All Paris seemed to
pass below, and the noise was so great that the window shook.

We knew nobody in the city; we had hurried our departure, but I was not
expected at the office till the following Monday. Since I had taken to
my bed I had wondered at my imprisonment in this narrow room into which
we had tumbled after a railway journey of fifteen hours, followed by a
hurried, confusing transit through the noisy streets. My wife had nursed
me with smiling tenderness, but I knew that she was anxious. She would
walk to the window, glance out and return to the bedside, looking very
pale and startled by the sight of the busy thoroughfare, the aspect
of the vast city of which she did not know a single stone and which
deafened her with its continuous roar. What would happen to her if I
never woke up again--alone, friendless and unknowing as she was?

Marguerite had caught hold of one of my hands which lay passive on the
coverlet, and, covering it with kisses, she repeated wildly: "Olivier,
answer me. Oh, my God, he is dead, dead!"

So death was not complete annihilation. I could hear and think. I had
been uselessly alarmed all those years. I had not dropped into utter
vacancy as I had anticipated. I could not picture the disappearance
of my being, the suppression of all that I had been, without the
possibility of renewed existence. I had been wont to shudder whenever in
any book or newspaper I came across a date of a hundred years hence. A
date at which I should no longer be alive, a future which I should never
see, filled