"How do you account for that look of fear on his face?" "I couldn't say. I've never seen anything like it. I've seen a lot of dead faces, but they are usually quiet enough, as if they were asleep. But I'll tell you one thing, sir, that I have noticed, and that is that money--which includes diamonds and such like, makes a man die worse and more bitter than anything else." He turned his lantern down the street. A sound of wheels reached us. "That's the ambulance." "Will you really require me at the police station?" I asked. "Yes." "Will it be necessary to prove who I am?" He smiled. "You won't need to prove that you're a doctor, sir," he said genially. "We have a lot to do with doctors. I could tell you were a doctor after talking a minute with you. You are all the same." "What do you mean?" "Well--it's the things you say. Now only a doctor could have said what you did--about life being a cell. Do you know, sir, I sometimes believe that doctors is more innocent than parsons. It's the things they say...." The low rumbling began again in his interior. I waited silently until the ambulance came up. I felt a slight shade of annoyance. But how could I expect the enormous uneducated bulk beside me to take a really intelligent and scientific view of life? Of course life was a cell. Every educated person knew that--and now that cell was, for the first time in history, about to become immortal--but what did the policeman care? How stupid people were, I reflected. We moved off in a small procession towards the police station. Half an hour later I was on my way west, deeply pondering on the causes of that extraordinary expression of fear in the dead sailor's face. Never in my life before had I seen so agonized a countenance, but I was destined to see others as terrible. As I walked, the strangeness of the dead man's tragedy grew in my mind and filled me with a tremendous wonder, for who had ever seen a dead Immortal? On reaching home I roused Sarakoff and related to him what I had seen. CHAPTER XIV FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF IMMORTALITY After two hours of sleep I awoke. My brief rest had been haunted by unpleasant dreams, vague and indefinite, but seeming to centre about the idea of an impending catastrophe. I lay in bed staring at the dimly outlined window. I felt quite rested and very wide awake. For some time I remained motionless, reflecting on my night adventures and idly thinking whether it was worth while getting up and attending to some correspondence that was overdue. The prospect of a chilly study was not attractive. And then I noticed a very peculiar sensation.