I just lay there and watched the gradual changing of the sky, and, faintly, heard clocks striking and the quiet swish of my wife’s dress.  Once my ear would have caught the ticking of our black marble clock on the mantelpiece; but not now—­it was lost to me.  I watched the gradual changing of the sky, until the blue of the sky had darkened so that the blackness of the smoke was merged in it.  But to the left there appeared a faint reddish glare, which showed where the furnaces were; this glare had been invisible in daylight.  I watched all that, and I waited patiently for the last trace of silver to vanish from a high part of the sky above where the sunset had been—­and it would not.  I would shut my eyes for an age, and then open them again, and the silver was always in the sky.  The cars kept rumbling up the hill and bumping down the hill.  And there was still that soft, languid feeling over everything.  And all the heat of the day remained.  Sometimes a waft of hot air moved the white curtains.  Margaret ate something off a plate.  The servant stole in.  Margaret gave a gesture as though to indicate that I was asleep.  But I was not asleep.  The servant went off.  Twice I restrained my thin, moist hands from playing with the edge of the sheet.  Then I closed my eyes with a kind of definite closing, as if finally admitting that I was too exhausted to keep them open.

II

Difficult to describe my next conscious sensations, when I found I was not in the bed!  I have never described them before.  You will understand why I’ve never described them to my wife.  I meant never to describe them to anyone.  But as you came all the way from London, Mr Myers, and seem to understand all this sort of thing, I’ve made up my mind to tell you for what it’s worth.  Yes, what you say about the difficulty of sticking to the exact truth is quite correct.  I feel it.  Still, I don’t think I over-flatter myself in saying that I am a more than ordinarily truthful man.

Well, I was looking at the bed.  I was not in the bed.  I can’t be precisely sure where I was standing, but I think it was between the two windows, half behind the crimson curtains.  Anyhow, I must have been near the windows, or I couldn’t have seen the foot of the bed and the couch that is there.  I could most distinctly hear Cauldon Church clock, more than two miles away, strike two.  I was cold.  Margaret was leaning over the bed, and staring at a face that lay on the pillows.  At first it did not occur to me that this face on the pillows was my face.  I had to reason out that fact.  When I had reasoned it out I tried to speak to Margaret and tell her that she was making a mistake, gazing at that thing there on the pillows, and that the real one was standing in the cold by the windows.  I could not speak.  Then I tried to attract her attention in other ways; but I could do nothing.  Once she turned sharply, as if startled, and looked straight at me.  I strove more frantically than ever to make signs to her; but no, I could not.  Seemingly she did not see.