rder not to betray his ignorance; for Krafft was not
didactic, and talked as if the subjects he touched on were as familiar
to Maurice as to himself. On the other hand, Maurice believed it was a
matter of indifference to him whether he was understood or not; he
spoke for the pure joy of talking, out of the motley profusion of his
knowledge.

Meanwhile, he had grown personal. And while he was still speaking with
fervour of Vienna--which was his home--of gay, melancholy Wien, he
flung round and put a question to his companion.

"Do you ever think of death?"

Maurice had been the listener for so long that he started.

"Death?" he echoed, and was as much embarrassed as though asked whether
he believed in God. "I don't know. No, I don't think I do. Why should
one think of death when one is alive and well?"

Krafft laughed at this, with a pitying irony. "Happy you!" he said.
"Happy you!" His voice sank, and he continued almost fearfully: "I have
the vision of it before me, always wherever I go. Listen; I will tell
you; it is like this." He laid his hand on Maurice's arm, and drew him
nearer. "I know--no matter how strong and sound I may be at this
moment; no matter how I laugh, or weep, or play the fool; no matter how
little thought I give it, or whether I think about it all day long--I
know the hour will come, at last, when I shall gasp, choke, grow black
in the face, in the vain struggle for another single mouthful of that
air which has always been mine at will. And no one will be able to help
me; there is no escape from that hour; no power on earth can keep it
from me. And it is all a matter of chance when it happens--a great
lottery: one draws to-day, one to-morrow; but my turn will surely come,
and each day that passes brings me twenty-four hours nearer the end."
He drew still closer to Maurice. "Tell me, have you never stood before
a doorway--the doorway of some strange house that you have perhaps
never consciously gone past before--and waited, with the atrocious
curiosity that death and its hideous paraphernalia waken in one, for a
coffin to be carried out?--the coffin of an utter stranger, who is of
interest to you now, for the first and the last time. And have you not
thought to yourself, with a shudder, that some day, in this selfsame
way, under the same indifferent sky, among a group of loiterers as idly
curious as these, you yourself will be carried out, feet foremost, like
a bale of goods, like useless lumbe