“That’s right,” called Gordon.  His voice rang harsh, in spite of his effort to control it.  He threw his arm over his eyes, and fairly groped his way back to his office, stifling his sobs.  When he was in his office he flung himself into a chair, and bent his head over his hands on the table, and his whole frame shook.  “Oh, my God!” he muttered.  “Oh, my God!” He did not weep, but he gasped like a child whom his mother has commanded not to weep.  Terrible emotion fairly convulsed him.  He struggled with it as with a visible foe.  At last he sat up and filled his pipe.  The dog had crept close to him, and was nestling against him and whimpering.  Gordon patted his head.  The dog licked his hand.

The simple, ignorant sympathy of this poor speechless thing nearly unnerved the man again, but he continued to smoke.  He looked at the dog, whose honest brown eyes were fixed upon him with an almost uncanny understanding, and reflected how the woman upstairs, who was passing out of his life, had become in a few days so associated with the animal, that after she was gone he could never see him without a pang.  He looked about the office, with whose belongings she was less associated than with anything in the house, and it seemed to him that everything even there would have for him, after she had passed, a terrible sting of reminiscence.  It seemed to him, as he looked about, as if she were already gone.  He was, in fact, suffering as keenly in anticipation as he would in reality.  The horror, the worst horror of life, of being left alive with the dead and the associations of the dead was already upon him.  Some people are comforted by such associations, others they rend.  Gordon was one whom they would rend, whom they did rend.  He made up his mind, as he sat there, that he would have to go away from Alton, and enter new scenes for the healing of his spirit, and yet he knew that he should not go:  that at the last his courage would assert itself.

He sat smoking, the dog’s head on his knee.  There was not a sound to be heard in the house.  Emma, the maid, had gone away to visit a sick sister.  She might not be back that night.  So there was absolute silence, even in the kitchen.  Suddenly the dog lifted his head and listened to something which Gordon could not himself hear.  He watched the dog curiously.  The dog gave a low growl of fear and rage, and made for the office door.  He began scratching at the threshold, and emitted a perfect volley of barks.  It did not sound like one dog, but a whole pack.  Gordon, with an impulse which he could not understand, quickly put out the prism-fringed lamp which hung over his table.  Then he sprang to the dog, and had the dog by the collar.  “Be still, Jack,” he said in a low voice, and the dog obeyed instantly, although he was quivering under his hand.  Gordon could feel the muscles run like angry serpents under the smooth white hair, he felt the crest of rage along his back.  But the animal was so well trained that he barked no more.  He only growled very softly, as if to himself, and quivered.