us
rebellion against the contrary influence which might dominate a timid
one. He looked at it as if in his reading he had come upon something
recalling him to a sense of his surroundings. Clearly this watcher by
the dead was discharging his trust with intelligence and composure, as
became him.

After reading for perhaps a half-hour he seemed to come to the end of a
chapter and quietly laid away the book. He then rose and taking the
reading-stand from the floor carried it into a corner of the room near
one of the windows, lifted the candle from it and returned to the empty
fireplace before which he had been sitting.

A moment later he walked over to the body on the table, lifted the sheet
and turned it back from the head, exposing a mass of dark hair and a
thin face-cloth, beneath which the features showed with even sharper
definition than before. Shading his eyes by interposing his free hand
between them and the candle, he stood looking at his motionless
companion with a serious and tranquil regard. Satisfied with his
inspection, he pulled the sheet over the face again and returning to the
chair, took some matches off the candlestick, put them in the side
pocket of his sack-coat and sat down. He then lifted the candle from its
socket and looked at it critically, as if calculating how long it would
last. It was barely two inches long; in another hour he would be in
darkness. He replaced it in the candlestick and blew it out.

II

In a physician's office in Kearny Street three men sat about a table,
drinking punch and smoking. It was late in the evening, almost midnight,
indeed, and there had been no lack of punch. The gravest of the three,
Dr. Helberson, was the host--it was in his rooms they sat. He was about
thirty years of age; the others were even younger; all were physicians.

"The superstitious awe with which the living regard the dead," said Dr.
Helberson, "is hereditary and incurable. One needs no more be ashamed of
it than of the fact that he inherits, for example, an incapacity for
mathematics, or a tendency to lie."

The others laughed. "Oughtn't a man to be ashamed to lie?" asked the
youngest of the three, who was in fact a medical student not yet
graduated.

"My dear Harper, I said nothing about that. The tendency to lie is one
thing; lying is another."

"But do you think," said the third man, "that this superstitious
feeling, this fear of the dead, reasonless as we know it to be, is
universal? I