The stillness of the studio in the intervals between the spasms of suffocation was painfully broken, as the long hour passed, by his heavy breathing and by the stifled sobs of the poor girl, who, at last, cried herself to sleep, exhausted by her watching. From outside, a dog’s mournful howl, breaking into a short, spasmodic bark, came up at intervals, and I could see that this sound disturbed the sufferer, probably recalling to his waning faculties the history of the dog that had so haunted us. From the street the chorus of the maskers came floating to us, sounding hollow and far away, like the chant of a distant choir in some great cathedral. Occasionally a carriage rumbled over the rough pavement, the deep sound echoing through the deserted court-yard and up the long, dreary stairways. It was within a few moments of the doctor’s expected visit that a spasm more violent than any previous one called me to the bedside. We had long since stopped the medicine, and nothing remained to do but to ease the sufferer over the chasm as gently as possible. He did not seem at all anxious to live, and in the agonies of the suffocation there was no fear in those dark eyes that rolled in their hollow sockets. I raised him in bed, and at last, after the most prolonged fight, he caught his breath, opened his eyes, turned towards me, and said plainly in English, “All right, old boy.” Then he relapsed into a comatose state and never spoke again. The doctor found him rapidly sinking, and another spasm came on while he was feeling the pulse. The patient recovered from it only to pass into another and more protracted one, at the end of which he sighed twice and was dead. For a second or two after the last deep breath his face had all the fever-flush and the look of life, but almost instantly he fell over towards me, changed beyond recognition. The wave of death had passed over us, carrying with it the last trace of life that lingered in the face of my friend, and a ghastly pallor crept over his cheeks, transforming him that I loved into an unrecognizable, inert thing. I turned away and never saw that face again, although they told me it was nobly beautiful in its Egyptian, changeless expression. That pause of an instant, while death was asserting its power, impressed me strangely--and this was no new experience for me. In that pause, when time seemed to stand still, something urged me to raise my eyes in confident expectation of seeing the spirit as it left the body. Even my heated imagination, to which I was ready to charge much that was inexplicable in my experience, did not produce an image, but instead, where the wall should have been I seemed to look into space, into a wide, wide distance. An awful vacancy, an infinity of emptiness, yawned before me, and I looked down to meet the fixed expression of that changed face. For that moment there was no lingering presence of my friend that I could feel; in that short struggle he had separated