Mr Burden was put to bed, not only by this servant, but by another named Elizabeth, and by the knife-and-boot boy too, whose daily task was indeed accomplished before nine, but who commonly remained against orders till eleven, that he might enjoy communion with his kind. And all these three, Kate Hatteras, Elizabeth, and the knife-boy, were awed in the presence of this good man, whom God had made and preserved, and was now taking back from them, and from Upper Norwood, and from England. The burden and the grotesque of their task wreathed up into the sublime; they felt like travellers over whom a mist is lifted until they see, startled, the majesty of great hills before them. Their souls were raised by the sharp apparent nearness of those awful gates, through which it was their high destiny also to pass at last. They saw revealed for another (they themselves had caught the revelation), the things which each of us is born to see, each at his own time, upon his dreadful day. Kate Hatteras, resolute and exact, left the boy to watch, called a messenger by telephone, sent him to a nursing home near by, and, finding a cab, directed it to fetch, not this or that celebrity, but a doctor of the place in whom she had some confidence. Within an hour, she had in the house a nurse of some age and experience, but insufficiently refreshed with sleep; there came next all manner of appliances, and, soon after, the young doctor, nervous and smiling rhythmically, who went up to the room and gave Death a long particular name. But Death could have no need of definition here. He was present with his most ancient titles, dominant upon a throne, ordering that infinite vast wherein the narrow walls of one poor human habitation were not seen, so tenuous were they. His armies at a summons filled the place all around: He was in his court and power. The servants were bidden by Kate Hatteras to go and sleep. The doctor wrote some useless thing, and left it for the morning. It was past midnight. Kate Hatteras lay down in the dressing-room near by, where, some few days before, the consultation had been held; she lay down dressed, and slept, and dreamt of a lonely shore where twilight stretched out endlessly along dull sands by a silent sea. But next door, in his bed (and above him some text or other in a frame) lay Mr Burden, her good master, in the agony of that last steep beyond which, they say, is an horizon. He muttered incoherently, with pauses of silence between, and the nurse, though lacking sleep, yet thought it her duty to watch. The September night was chilly; a fire was lit. She sat rigid and staring at the fire, till, in a longer spell of silence, her head drooped; and she living, her living body in spite of her will, fell unconscious into repose. But round the dying man were other companions.