fted away from me, out of her body that
I held in my arms. Without a farewell, without a word, without any
knowledge of the second when the life had fled, without a sound beyond
that despairing, terrified appeal to me to keep her. I stood rigid,
petrified, my arms locked round her like iron bands. I heard the door
open and steps. Then I saw the doctor before me. He gave one glance at
the drooping head.

"Lay her down flat," he said.

I lifted her into my arms wholly, and walked through the door into the
corridor to the opposite room--our room, and laid her on the bed. He
followed me to the bedside and bent over her. I drew back and stood
beside the curtain motionless. Everything was swaying before my eyes in
darkened confusion. Was this my wedding night? There was the room, full
of warm, shaded light; there was the bed, and on it a passive woman's
figure, and another man bent over it and tore aside the bodice and
unclasped the white stays.

I watched his hand part them and pass indifferently beneath them, and
beneath the linen, and rest over the left breast and then beneath it.
The shade grew colder on his face. There was an intense silence in the
room, then the words came across it, "Quite extinct." My ears seemed to
fill with sounds, the ground to rise upward, the bed to heave, and I
went forward blindly and tore his hand from her breast and pushed him
from the bed.

"Then go and leave us," I said, and I heard my own voice as from a
great distance.

He looked at me, and his face and everything around was dark before my
eyes.

"Will you kindly go out of this room?" I repeated, and he walked to the
door.

I opened it, he passed out, and I shut and locked it, and came back to
the bed. The weight of nerveless, passive beauty on it had crushed a
depression in its whiteness, the head had sunk down sideways to the
pillow as in tired sleep. Across the throat and breast, over and
amongst the disturbed laces of her dress, and on the parted gleaming
satin of her stays fell a flood of rose-coloured light. One shoulder
rose from it and caught a shadow; another shade lay lower in the
dimples of the elbow; the inside of the arm looked warm. The throat,
the round soft throat, seemed glowing; the fallen head, the passive
arms, the whole outstretched form seemed relaxed in the abandonment of
sleep. Had I often seen her in my dreams like this? This was but the
realisation of my dreams. I bent over her, then threw myself wildly