Then I thought:  “I’m dead!  This is being dead!  I’ve died!”

Margaret ran to the dressing-table and picked up her hand-mirror.  She rubbed it carefully on the counterpane, and then held it to the mouth and nostrils of that face on the pillows, and then examined it under the gas.  She was very agitated; the whole of her demeanour had changed; I scarcely recognized her.  I could not help thinking that she was mad.  She put down the mirror, glanced at the clock, even glanced out of the window (she was much closer to me than I am now to you), and then flew back to the bed.  She seized the scissors that were hanging from her girdle, and cut a hole in the top pillow, and drew from it a flock of down, which she carefully placed on the lips of that face.  The down did not even tremble.  Then she bared the breast of the body on the bed, and laid her ear upon the region of the heart; I could see her eyes blinking as she listened intensely.  After she had listened some time she raised her head, with a little sob, and frantically pulled the bell-rope.  I could hear the bell; we could both hear it.  There was no response; nothing but a fearful silence.  Margaret, catching her breath, rushed out of the room.  I was sick with the most awful disgust that I could not force her to see where I was.  I had been helpless before, when I lay in the bed, but I was far more completely helpless now.  Talk about the babe unborn!

She came back with the servant, and the two women stood on either side of the bed, gazing at that body.  The servant whispered: 

“They do say that if you put a full glass of water on the chest you can tell for sure.”

Margaret hesitated.  However, the servant began to fill a glass of water on the washstand, and they poised it on the chest of that body.  Not the slightest vibration troubled its surface.  I was—­not angry; no, tremendously disgusted is the only term I can use—­at all this flummery with that body on the bed.  It was shocking to me that they should confuse that body with me.  I thought them silly, wilfully silly.  I thought their behaviour monstrously blind.  There was I, the master of the house, standing chilled between the windows, and neither Margaret nor the servant would take the least notice of me!

The servant said: 

“I’d better run for the doctor, ma’am.”  And she lifted off the glass.

“What use can the doctor be?” Margaret asked.  “Only spoil the poor man’s night for nothing.  And he’s had a lot of bad nights lately.  He told me to be—­prepared.”

The servant said: 

“Yes, mum..  But I’d better run for him.  That’s what doctors is for.”