In a vague way, this lack of sharp sensation worked upon my amazement. I remember that, in explanation of it, I recalled one of Morton's tales about a traveler whom a lion seized as he sat at his campfire; and how, while the lion crunched him in his jaws and dragged him to a distance, he still had no feel of pain, but--as I had then--only a numbness and fog of nerves. While this went running in my head, I heard the rattle of someone at the street door, and was aware, I don't know how, that another physician had come. A moment later my ear overtook whisperings in the hall just beyond my own door. Moved of an instinct that might have prompted some threatened animal to spy out what danger overhung him, I went, cat-foot, to the door and listened. It was the two physicians in talk. “The girl is dead,” I heard one say. “What malady?” asked the other. “And there's the marvel of it!” cries the first. “No malady at all, as I'm a doctor! She died of suffocation. The case is without a parallel. Indubitably, it was that birthmark--that mark as of a rope upon her neck. Like the grip of destiny itself, the mark has been growing and tightening about her throat since ever she lay in her cradle, until now she dies of it. A most remarkable case! It is precisely as though she were hanged--the congested eye, the discolored face, the swollen tongue, aye! and about her throat, the very mark of the rope!” Blossom dead! my girl dead! Apple Cheek, Anne, Blossom, all gone, and I to be left alone! Alone! The word echoed in the hollows of my empty heart as in a cavern! There came a blur, and then a fearful whirling; that gorilla strength was as the strength of children; my slow knees began to cripple down! That was the last I can recall; I fell as if struck by a giant's mallet, and all was black. CHAPTER XXVIII--BEING THE EPILOGUE WHAT should there be more? My house stands upon a hill; waving, sighing trees are ranked about it, while to the eastward I have the shimmering stretches of the river beneath my feet. From a wooden seat between two beeches, I may see the fog-loom born of the dust and smoke of the city far away. At night, when clouds lie thick and low, the red reflection of the city's million lamps breaks on the sky as though a fire raged. It is upon my seat between the beeches that I spend my days. Men would call my life a stagnant one; I care not, since I find it peace. I have neither hopes nor fears nor pains nor joys; there come no exaltations, no depressions; within me is a serenity--a kind of silence like the heart of nature. At that I have no dimness; I roll and rock for hours on the dead swells of old days, while old faces and old scenes toss to and fro like seaweed with the tides of my memory. I am prey to no regrets, to no ambitions; my times own neither currents nor winds; I have outlived importance and the liking for it; and all those little noises that keep the world awake, I never hear.