“And the child,” she murmured—­“The child—­it clung to me and I kissed it!—­it was a dear little thing!”

She glanced about her nervously—­the room seemed full of wandering shadows.

“I must sleep!” she thought—­“I am worried and out of sorts—­I must sleep and forget—­”

She took out of a drawer in her dressing-table a case of medicinal cachets marked “Veronal.”

“One or two more or less will not hurt me,” she said, with a pale, forced smile at herself in the mirror—­“I am accustomed to it—­and I must have a good long sleep!”

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She had her way.  Morning came,—­and she was still sleeping.  Noon—­ and nothing could waken her.  Doctors, hastily summoned, did their best to rouse her to that life which with all its pains and possibilities still throbbed in the world around her—­but their efforts were vain.

“Suicide?” whispered one.

“Oh no!  Mere accident!—­an overdose of veronal—­some carelessness —­quite a common occurrence.  Nothing to be done!”

No!—­nothing to be done!  Her slumber had deepened into that strange stillness which we call death,—­and her husband, a statuesque and rigid figure, gazed on her quiet body with tearless eyes.

“Good-night!” he whispered to the heavy silence—­“Good-night!  Farewell!”

CHAPTER VI

One of the advantages or disadvantages of the way in which we live in these modern days is that we are ceasing to feel.  That is to say we do not permit ourselves to be affected by either death or misfortune, provided these natural calamities leave our own persons unscathed.  We are beginning not to understand emotion except as a phase of bad manners, and we cultivate an apathetic, soulless indifference to events of great moment whether triumphant or tragic, whenever they do not involve our own well-being and creature comforts.  Whole boatloads of fishermen may go forth to their doom in the teeth of a gale without moving us to pity so long as we have our well-fried sole or grilled cod for breakfast, —­and even such appalling disasters as the wicked assassination of hapless monarchs, or the wrecks of palatial ocean-liners with more than a thousand human beings all whelmed at once in the pitiless depths of the sea, leave us cold, save for the uplifting of our eyes and shoulders during an hour or so,—­an expression of slight shock, followed by forgetfulness.  Air-men, recklessly braving the spaces of the sky, fall headlong, and are smashed to mutilated atoms every month or so, without rousing us to more than a passing comment, and a chorus of “How dreadful!” from simpering women,—­ and the greatest and best man alive cannot hope for long remembrance by the world at large when he dies.  Shakespeare recognised this tendency in callous human nature when he made his Hamlet say—­

“O heavens!  Die two months ago and not forgotten yet?  Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year, but by ’r lady, he must build churches then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on.”