Having recovered that, he lighted it and instantly turned his eyes to the table, where, naturally, nothing had undergone any change.  The reading-stand lay unobserved upon the floor:  he had forgotten to “put it to rights.”  He looked all about the room, dispersing the deeper shadows by movements of the candle in his hand, and crossing over to the door tested it by turning and pulling the knob with all his strength.  It did not yield and this seemed to afford him a certain satisfaction; indeed, he secured it more firmly by a bolt which he had not before observed.  Returning to his chair, he looked at his watch; it was half-past nine.  With a start of surprise he held the watch at his ear.  It had not stopped.  The candle was now visibly shorter.  He again extinguished it, placing it on the floor at his side as before.

Mr. Jarette was not at his ease; he was distinctly dissatisfied with his surroundings, and with himself for being so.  “What have I to fear?” he thought.  “This is ridiculous and disgraceful; I will not be so great a fool.”  But courage does not come of saying, “I will be courageous,” nor of recognizing its appropriateness to the occasion.  The more Jarette condemned himself, the more reason he gave himself for condemnation; the greater the number of variations which he played upon the simple theme of the harmlessness of the dead, the more insupportable grew the discord of his emotions.  “What!” he cried aloud in the anguish of his spirit, “what! shall I, who have not a shade of superstition in my nature—­I, who have no belief in immortality—­I, who know (and never more clearly than now) that the after-life is the dream of a desire—­shall I lose at once my bet, my honor and my self-respect, perhaps my reason, because certain savage ancestors dwelling in caves and burrows conceived the monstrous notion that the dead walk by night?—­that—­” Distinctly, unmistakably, Mr. Jarette heard behind him a light, soft sound of footfalls, deliberate, regular, successively nearer!

IV

Just before daybreak the next morning Dr. Helberson and his young friend Harper were driving slowly through the streets of North Beach in the doctor’s coupe.

“Have you still the confidence of youth in the courage or stolidity of your friend?” said the elder man.  “Do you believe that I have lost this wager?”

“I know you have,” replied the other, with enfeebling emphasis.

“Well, upon my soul, I hope so.”

It was spoken earnestly, almost solemnly.  There was a silence for a few moments.

“Harper,” the doctor resumed, looking very serious in the shifting half-lights that entered the carriage as they passed the street lamps, “I don’t feel altogether comfortable about this business.  If your friend had not irritated me by the contemptuous manner in which he treated my doubt of his endurance—­a purely physical quality—­and by the cool incivility of his suggestion that the corpse be that of a physician, I should not have gone on with it.  If anything should happen we are ruined, as I fear we deserve to be.”