over everything at sunset of a hot summer’s day.  This universal change affected even the tramcars, so that they rolled up and down the hill more gently.  Or it may have been merely my imagination.  Through the open windows I could see, dimly, the smoke of the Cauldon Bar Iron Works slowly crossing the sky in front of the sunset.  Margaret sat in my grandfather’s oak chair by the gas-stove.  There was only Margaret, besides the servant, in the house; the nurse had been obliged to go back to Pirehill Infirmary for the night.  I don’t know why.  Moreover, it didn’t matter.

[Footnote A:  Some years ago the editor of Black and White commissioned me to write a story for his Christmas Number.  I wrote this story.  He expressed a deep personal admiration for it, but said positively that he would not dare to offer it to his readers.  I withdrew the story, and gave him instead a frolic tale about a dentist. (See page 136.) Afterwards, I was glad that I had withdrawn the story, for I perceived that its theme could only be treated adequately in a novel, I accordingly wrote the novel, which was duly published under the same title.—­A.B.]

I began running my extraordinarily white fingers along the edge of the sheet.  I was doing this quite mechanically when I noticed a look of alarm in Margaret’s face, and I vaguely remembered that playing with the edge of the sheet was supposed to be a trick of the dying.  So I stopped, more for Margaret’s sake than for anything else.  I could not move my head much, in fact scarcely at all; hence it was difficult for me to keep my eyes on objects that were not in my line of vision as I lay straight on my pillows.  Thus my eyes soon left Margaret’s.  I forgot her.  I thought about nothing.  Then she came over to the bed, and looked at me, and I smiled at her, very feebly.  She smiled in return.  She appeared to me to be exceedingly strong and healthy.  Six weeks before I had been the strong and healthy one—­I was in my prime, forty, and had a tremendous appetite for business—­and I had always regarded her as fragile and delicate; and now she could have crushed me without effort!  I had an unreasonable, instinctive feeling of shame at being so weak compared to her.  I knew that I was leaving her badly off; we were both good spenders, and all my spare profits had gone into the manufactory; but I did not trouble about that.  I was almost quite callous about that.  I thought to myself, in a confused way:  “Anyhow, I shan’t be here to see it, and she’ll worry through somehow!” Nor did I object to dying.  It may be imagined that I resented death at so early an age, and being cut off in my career, and prevented from getting the full benefit of the new china-firing oven that I had patented.  Not at all!  It may be imagined that I was preoccupied with a future life, and thinking that possibly we had given up going to chapel without sufficient reason.  No!  I just lay there, submitting like a person without will or desires to the nursing of my wife, which was all of it accurately timed by the clock.