As soon as the front-door banged on the excited servant, my wife fell on that body with a loud cry, and stroked it passionately, and I could see her tears dropping on it.  She wept without any restraint.  She loved me very much; I knew that.  But the fact that she loved me only increased my horror that she should be caressing that body, which was not me at all, which had nothing whatever to do with me, which was loathsome, vile, and as insensible as a log to the expressions of her love.  She was not weeping over me.  She was weeping over an abomination.  She was all wrong, all tragically wrong, and I could not set her right.  Her woe desolated me.  We had been happy together for sixteen years.  Her error desolated me, as a painful farce.  But a slow, horrible change in my own consciousness made me forget her grief in my own increasing misery.

III

I do not suppose that the feeling which came over me is capable of being described in human language.  It can only be hinted at, not truly conveyed.  If I say that I was utterly overcome by the sensation of being cut off from everything, I shall perhaps not impress you very much with a notion of my terror.  But I do not see how I can better express myself.  No one who has not been through what I have been through—­it is a pretty awful thought that all who die do probably go through it—­can possibly understand the feeling of acute and frightful loneliness that possessed me as I stood near the windows, that wrapped me up and enveloped me, as it were, in an icy sheet.  A few people in England are possibly in my case—­they have been, and they have returned, like me.  They will understand, and only they.  I was solitary in the universe.  I was invisible, and I was forgotten.  There was my poor wife lavishing her immense sorrow on that body on the bed, which had ceased to have any connection with me, which was emphatically not me, and to which I felt the strongest repugnance.  I was even jealous of that lifeless, unresponsive, decaying mass.  You cannot guess how I tried to yell to my wife to come to me and warm me with her companionship and her sympathy—­and I could accomplish nothing, not the faintest whisper.

I had no home, no shelter, no place in the world, no share in life.  I was cast out.  The changeless purposes of nature had ejected me from humanity.  It was as though humanity had been a fortified city and the gates had been shut on me, and I was wandering round and round the unscalable smooth walls, and beating against their stone with my hands.  That is a good simile, except that I could not move.  Of course if I could have moved I should have gone to my wife.  But I could not move.  To be quite exact, I could move very slightly, perhaps about an inch or two inches, and in any direction, up or down, to left or right, backwards or forwards; this by a great straining, fatiguing effort.  I was stuck there on the surface of the world, desolate and undone.