“You aren’t dead, are you, father?  Father!”

It was a wild sorrow, without consideration or bashfulness, and the young doctor felt that he was witnessing an unpleasant scene from life in the outskirts of the town.  He had done his duty and hastened out.

A twenty-year-old workshop apprentice, pale and overcome, was standing behind Silla, trying to recall her to herself.  He took her by the shoulder, and whispered repeatedly, as loudly as respect for the dead would allow: 

“Silla!  Silla! don’t you hear?  It’s me—­Nikolai!”

And he tried in vain two or three times to lift her up from the body.

Meanwhile a policeman stood and examined Mrs. Selvig and the girls.  He made notes, and took down the particulars of the death.

Just finished his usual quantity, a bottle of ale and four drams.  The girl at the bar saw him quickly stretch out his hand—­had the impression that he wanted another dram—­and when he slowly sank down from his chair, supposed that he was drunk.  Used never to be so drunk that he could not walk or stand, at any rate by supporting himself or holding on to convenient, firm things.

This last piece of evidence was deposed to by several of the regular customers, or as they were described in the police report—­“Several of the regular visitors to the refreshment-room, whose testimony may be considered as thoroughly reliable.”

Several of these silent, somewhat tottering, figures who had been thus aroused from their dull, Saturday evening drowsiness, had already disappeared from the scene.  Bottles and glasses remained standing with their contents.

“Might there not possibly be some other direct or indirect cause?”

It was at first hesitatingly that Mrs. Selvig could think of anything of the sort.

Unwilling as she was to go to extremes with an old, regular customer, she yet had been obliged this evening to give him to understand that whatever he required in future must be paid for in cash.  His bill had now, after all the years he had enjoyed credit in the tap-room, grown so enormous, that she, a widow with two daughters, could no longer feel justified in letting it run on.  During all the years he had frequented her house, she had faithfully kept her word never to send a bill home to his house.  But a bill cannot lie for ever on the threshold, as the police know.  That is the way of the world:  it is the same for one as it is for the other—­so it must just be got by a distress warrant.  That was what she had said to him, unwilling though she had been to do so, and so unpleasant, she could truthfully say, as it was to disturb such a quiet, decent man.

It was high time to rid the bar of its encumbrance.  The public-house bear had hunted up a hand-barrow, but had to get a couple more men to help carry.  And they must have a proper contrivance with a cloth over, so that the whole thing would look like a hospital stretcher—­a dead man with nothing but a tablecloth over him would make too great a commotion out in the street!