nt said:

"I'd better run for the doctor, ma'am." And she lifted off the glass.

"What use can the doctor be?" Margaret asked. "Only spoil the poor man's
night for nothing. And he's had a lot of bad nights lately. He told me
to be--prepared."

The servant said:

"Yes, mum.. But I'd better run for him. That's what doctors is for."

As soon as the front-door banged on the excited servant, my wife fell on
that body with a loud cry, and stroked it passionately, and I could see
her tears dropping on it. She wept without any restraint. She loved me
very much; I knew that. But the fact that she loved me only increased my
horror that she should be caressing that body, which was not me at all,
which had nothing whatever to do with me, which was loathsome, vile, and
as insensible as a log to the expressions of her love. She was not
weeping over me. She was weeping over an abomination. She was all wrong,
all tragically wrong, and I could not set her right. Her woe desolated
me. We had been happy together for sixteen years. Her error desolated
me, as a painful farce. But a slow, horrible change in my own
consciousness made me forget her grief in my own increasing misery.

III

I do not suppose that the feeling which came over me is capable of being
described in human language. It can only be hinted at, not truly
conveyed. If I say that I was utterly overcome by the sensation of being
_cut off from everything_, I shall perhaps not impress you very much
with a notion of my terror. But I do not see how I can better express
myself. No one who has not been through what I have been through--it is
a pretty awful thought that all who die do probably go through it--can
possibly understand the feeling of acute and frightful loneliness that
possessed me as I stood near the windows, that wrapped me up and
enveloped me, as it were, in an icy sheet. A few people in England are
possibly in my case--they have _been_, and they have returned, like me.
They will understand, and only they. I was solitary in the universe. I
was invisible, and I was forgotten. There was my poor wife lavishing her
immense sorrow on that body on the bed, which had ceased to have any
connection with me, which was emphatically not me, and to which I felt
the strongest repugnance. I was even jealous of that lifeless,
unresponsive, decaying mass. You cannot guess how I tried to yell to my
wife to come to me and warm me with her companionship and her
sympathy--