“We are on safer ground with the other tragic happenings, though, save in the case of Nurse Forrester, there is nothing on the surface of events to connect their deaths with the accursed bed.  You will see, however, that it is very easy to do so.  In the lady’s case all is clear enough.  She goes to bed tired and she sleeps peacefully into death without waking.  She is probably asleep within ten minutes, before her own warmth has penetrated through sheet and blanket to the mattress beneath and so destroyed her.  Suppose that she is dead in half an hour.  She retired to rest at ten o’clock; she is called at seven; the room is presently broken into and she is then not only dead, but cold.  The demon has gone to sleep again under its lifeless burden.  Now had she been stout and well covered, there had hardly been time for her to grow cold, and those who came to her assistance might even have perished, too.  But she is a little, thin thing, and the heat has gone out of her.  This assured the safety of those who came to the bedside.  One can make no laws as to the time necessary for a dead body to grow as cold as its surroundings.  The bodies of the old and the young cool more quickly than those of adult persons.  If the conditions are favorable a body may cool in six to eight hours.  Prince took but five, poor little bag of bones.

“In the case of Captain May the conditions are altogether different.  Let me speak with all tenderness and spare you pain.  Be sure that he suffered no more than the others.  The bed is now no longer made; the mattress is bare.  That matters not to him.  Clad in his pyjamas, with a railway rug to cover him and his dressing-gown for a pillow, he flings himself down, and from his powerful and sanguine frame warmth is instantly communicated to the mattress that supports him.  Probably but a few minutes were sufficient to liberate the poison.  He is not asleep, but on the edge of sleep when he becomes suddenly conscious of physical sensations beyond his experience.  He had breathed death, but yet he is not dead.  His brain works, and can send a message to his limbs, which are still able to obey.  But his hour has come.  He leaps from the bed in no suffering, but conscious, perhaps of an oppression, or an unfamiliar odor—­we cannot say what.  We only know that he feels intense surprise, not pain for in that dying moment his emotions are fixed for ever by the muscles of his face.  He needs air and seeks it.  He hurries to the recess, kneels on the cushion, and throws open the window.  Or the window may have been already open—­we cannot tell.  To reach it is his last conscious act, and in another moment he is dead.  The bed is not suspected.  Why should it be?  Who could prove that he had even laid down upon it?  Indeed it was believed and reported at the inquest that he had not done so.  Yet that is what unquestionably happened.  Otherwise his candle would have burned to the socket.  He had blown it out and settled to rest, be sure.