er! water! water!" She
panted, and her tongue protruded slightly. Her husband turned away, his
shoulders twitching. The nurse held a silver goblet to the woman's lips.
She drank greedily, then scowled up at the doctor.

"You missed it," she said. "I should be glad, for I hate you, only you
give me more relief than they. They are afraid. They tried to fool me,
the idiots! But they didn't try it twice. I bit."

She laughed and threw her arms above her head. The loose sleeves of her
gown fell back and disclosed arms speckled as if from an explosion of
gunpowder.

"Just an ordinary morphine fiend," thought the doctor. "And she is the
wife of John Schuyler!"

An hour after dinner he told the husband and nurse to go to bed. For a
while he read, the woman sleeping profoundly. The house was absolutely
still, or seemed to be. Had pandemonium reigned he could hardly have
heard an echo of it from this isolated room. The window was open, but
looked upon roofs and back yards; no sound of carriage wheels rose to
break the quiet. Despite the stillness, the doctor had to strain his ear
to catch the irregular breathing of the sick woman. He had a singular
feeling, although the most unimaginative of men, that this third floor,
containing only himself and the woman, had been sliced from the rest of
the house and hung suspended in space, independent of natural laws. It
was after the book had ceased to interest him that the idea shaped
itself, born of another, as yet unacknowledged, skulking in the recesses
of his brain. At length he laid aside the book, and going to the bed,
looked down upon the woman, coldly, reflectively--exactly as he had
often watched the quivering of an animal--dissected alive in the cause
of science.

Studying this man's face, it was impossible to imagine it agitated by
any passion except thirst for knowledge. The skin was as white as
marble; the profile was straight and mathematical, the mouth a straight
line, the chin as square as that of a chiselled Fate. The jaw was
prominent, powerful, relentless. The eyes were deeply set and gray as
polished steel. The large brow was luminous, very full--an index to the
terrible intellect of the man.

As he looked down on the woman his thin nostrils twitched once and his
lips compressed more firmly. Then he smiled. It was an odd, almost
demoniacal smile.

"A physician," he said, half aloud, "has almost as much power as God.
The idea strikes me that we are the personifi