“Dead—can he be dead?” whispered Jake, slipping a hand under his waistcoat.
Wesley shook his head.
“He is not dead, but in a trance,” he replied.
CHAPTER XII
For half an hour the four men in that room sat watching with painful interest the one who sat motionless in the chair at the end of the table. There was not one of them that had not a feeling of being a watcher by the side of a bed on which a dead body was lying. Not a word was exchanged between them. In the room there was a complete silence—the silence of a death chamber. The sound of the machinery of the mill—the creaking of the wooden wheels, and the rumbling of the grindstones—went on in dull monotony in the mill, and from the kitchen, beyond the oaken door, there came the occasional clink of a pan or kettle; and outside the building there was the clank of the horses of a waggon, and the loud voices of the waggoners talking to the men in one of the lofts, and now and again directing the teams. A cock was crowing drowsily at intervals in the poultry run, and once there was a quacking squabble amongst the ducks on the Mill race. And then, with the lowing of the cows that were being driven to the milking shed, came the laughter of a girl, passing the waggoners.
But in the room there was silence, and soon the dimness of twilight.
And then John Wesley prayed in a low voice.