Death-in-Life answered, _I am here_. The doctor's eye, rising
attentively by way of his hands and arms, questioned upward and
upward to the muscles round his mouth, and Death-in-Life
answered, _I am coming_.

In the face of a calamity so unsparing and so dreadful, there was
nothing to be said. The silent sympathy of help was all that
could be offered to the woman who stood weeping at the carriage
door.

As they bore him on his bed across the hall of the hotel,
his wandering eyes encountered the face of his wife. They rested
on her for a moment, and in that moment he spoke.

"The child?" he said in English, with a slow, thick, laboring
articulation.

"The child is safe upstairs," she answered, faintly.

"My desk?"

"It is in my hands. Look! I won't trust it to anybody; I am
taking care of it for you myself."

He closed his eyes for the first time after that answer, and said
no more. Tenderly and skillfully he was carried up the stairs,
with his wife on one side of him, and the doctor (ominously
silent) on the other. The landlord and the servants following saw
the door of his room open and close on him; heard the lady burst
out crying hysterically as soon as she was alone with the doctor