able, kind, gentle doorkeeper, with the
blue, typical eyes of a soldier, and with medals across his breast--he
himself with his own hands would have opened the terrible door, opened
it because he knew nothing. Everybody would have smiled because they did
not know anything. "Oho!" he suddenly said aloud, and slowly removed his
hands from his face. Peering into the darkness, far ahead of him, with a
fixed, strained look, he outstretched his hand just as slowly, felt the
button on the wall and pressed it. Then he arose, and without putting
on his slippers, walked in his bare feet over the rug in the strange,
unfamiliar bedroom, found the button of another lamp upon the wall and
pressed it. It became light and pleasant, and only the disarranged
bed with the blanket, which had slipped off to the floor, spoke of the
horror, not altogether past.

In his night-clothes, with his beard disheveled by his restless
movements, with his angry eyes, the dignitary resembled any other angry
old man who suffered with insomnia and shortness of breath. It was as
if the death which people were preparing for him, had made him bare, had
torn away from him the magnificence and splendor which had surrounded
him--and it was hard to believe that it was he who had so much power,
that his body was but an ordinary plain human body that must have
perished terribly in the flame and roar of a monstrous explosion.
Without dressing himself and not feeling the cold, he sat down in the
first armchair he found, stroking his disheveled beard, and fixed his
eyes in deep, calm thoughtfulness upon the unfamiliar plaster figures of
the ceiling.

So that was the trouble! That was why he had trembled in fear and had
become so agitated! That was why Death seemed to stand in the corner and
would not go away, could not go away!

"Fools!" he said emphatically, with contempt.

"Fools!" he repeated more loudly, and turned his head slightly toward
the door that those to whom he was referring might hear it. He was
referring to those whom he had praised but a moment before, who in the
excess of their zeal had told him of the plot against his life.

"Of course," he thought deeply, an easy, convincing idea arising in his
mind. "Now that they have told me, I know, and feel terrified, but if I
had not been told, I would not have known anything and would have drunk
my coffee calmly. After that Death would have come--but then, am I so
afraid of Death? Here have I been suffer