The unwilling soul had already
started on its journey, and its earthly love was no more to it than
its earthly form. I held her motionless, my eyes on hers, then I saw
a glaze, a slow glaze fit upon them, they set in it, and it told me
she was dead.
Without a struggle, without a spasm, without a deeper breath to mark
the severance, her soul had drifted away from me, out of her body
that I held in my arms. Without a farewell, without a word, without
any knowledge of the second when the life had fled, without a sound
beyond that despairing, terrified appeal to me to keep her. I stood
rigid, petrified, my arms locked round her like iron bands. I heard
the door open and steps. Then I saw the doctor before me. He gave
one glance at the drooping head.
"Lay her down flat," he said.
I lifted her into my arms wholly, and walked through the door into
the corridor to the opposite room--our room, and laid her on the
bed. He followed me to the bedside and bent over her. I drew back
and stood beside the curtain motionless. Everything was swaying
before my eyes in darkened confusion. Was this my wedding night?
There was the room, full of warm, shaded light; there was the bed,
and on it a passive woman's figure, and another man bent over it and
tore aside the bodice and unclasped the white stays.
I watched his hand part them and pass indifferently beneath them,
and beneath the linen, and rest over the left breast and then
beneath it.
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