"Will you?" said the landlord. "Then I wish you a good night's
rest." With that brief farewell he went out and shut the door
after him.

A good night's rest! The words had hardly been spoken, the door
had hardly been closed, before Arthur half repented the hasty
words that had just escaped him. Though not naturally
over-sensitive, and not wanting in courage of the moral as well
as the physical sort, the presence of the dead man had an
instantaneously chilling effect on his mind when he found himself
alone in the room--alone, and bound by his own rash words to stay
there till the next morning. An older man would have thought
nothing of those words, and would have acted, without reference
to them, as his calmer sense suggested. But Arthur was too young
to treat the ridicule even of his inferiors with contempt--too
young not to fear the momentary humiliation of falsifying his own
foolish boast more than he feared the trial of watching out the
long night in the same chamber with the dead.

"It is but a few hours," he thought to himself, "and I can get
away the first thing in the morning."

He was looking toward the occupied bed as that idea passed
through his mind, and the sharp, angular eminence made in the
clothes by the dead man's upturned feet again caught his eye. He
advanced and drew the curtains, purposely abstaining, as he did
so, from looking at the face of the corpse, lest he might unnerve
himself at the outset by fastening some ghastly impression of it
on his mind. He drew the curtain very gently, and sighed
involuntarily as he closed it.