It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice’s bedside, that he was not in the least needed.  The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone.  It was such a comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to hear something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered words, that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had proved irresistible.

Unfortunately, Maurice’s slumbers did not remain tranquil during the absence of the nurse.  He very soon fell into a dream, which began quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing, terrifying.  His earlier and later experiences came up before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality.  He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building.  How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling!  The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break.  How thin the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe!  He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents.  No, it was not Mont Blanc,—­it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla that he was climbing.

The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.

The room was full of smoke.  He was gasping for breath, strangling in the smothering oven which his chamber had become.

The house was on fire!

He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a whisper.  He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back upon his pillow, helpless.  He felt that his hour had come, for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone.  He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to another.  It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,—­the fate that many a martyr had had to face,—­to be first strangled and then burned.  Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young persons.  He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had come upon him as a temptation.  But here was death in an unexpected