That was like a delicious arrival of death, of death delicate and serene, ivory white and pure, death desirable, grateful.

Valentine indeed believed that he was dying, there in the darkness beside his friend, and, impersonally as it seemed, something of him, his brain perhaps, seemed to be floating high up, as a bird floats over the sea, and listening, and noting all that he did in this crisis.

This attentive spirit heard a strange movement of his soul in its bodily prison, heard his soul stir, as if waking out of sleep, heard it shift, and rise up slowly, noted its pause of hesitation.

Then, as the vitality of the body ebbed lower, there grew in the soul an excitement that aspired like a leaping flame.

It was as if a madman, prisoned in his narrow cell in a vast asylum, secluded with his company of phantoms, heard the crackling of the fire that devoured his habitation, and was stirred into an ignorant and yet tumultuous passion.