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.
"Poor fellow," he said, almost as sadly as if he had known the man.