One of us ran down the stairs to the street
for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at
the last step.

The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its
pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my
telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations
which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking
life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those
vast sighs.

They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the
expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there
was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so
remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to
our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a
surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to
the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret,
speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from
which there is no returning.

There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and
slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and
expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to
begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over
the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of
soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the
thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all
dust forever.

That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest
of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow
which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and
who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having
been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident
remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than
seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They
whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the
fact.

VIII

THE BOARDERS

The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary,
and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly
good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving
the place permanently because he could not bear it any