y had been getting
stronger, now beat feebler every hour. In that part of the country where
I was born and grew up, the folks say that wherever the dead lie, there
round about them, whether the time be summer or winter, the air grows
cold and colder, and that no fire, though you pile the logs half-way up
the chimney, will ever make it warm. A few months' hospital training
generally cures one of all fanciful notions about death, but this idea I
have never been able to get rid of. My thermometer may show me sixty,
and I may try to believe that the temperature _is_ sixty, but if the dead
are beside me I feel cold to the marrow of my bones. I could _see_ the
chill from the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up
about his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart.

"Jeanie and I redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if Death were
waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at the keyhole
for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth slip out. I hardly
ever left his side except now and again to go into that next room, and
poke an imaginary fire, and say a few chaffing words to an imaginary
living woman on the bed where the dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to
the corpse, and called out saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers
to his anxious questions.

"At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms we
should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs, and,
shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the yard, laugh
till we reeled against the dirty walls. I think we were both getting a
little mad.

"One day--it was the third of that nightmare life, so I learned
afterwards, though for all I could have told then it might have been the
three hundredth, for Time seemed to have fled from that house as from a
dream, so that all things were tangled--I made a slip that came near to
ending the matter, then and there.

"I had gone into that other room. Jeanie had left her post for a moment,
and the place was empty.

"I did not think what I was doing. I had not closed my eyes that I can
remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses were losing
their hold of one another. I went through my usual performance of
talking loudly to the thing underneath the white sheet, and noisily
patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on the table.

"On my return, he asked me how she was, and I answered, half in a dream,