“Stand aside,” said Thane.
“You will kill him,” said the doctor. “Do you hear that? This will kill him. I forbid it.”
Thane seemed not at all impressed. Probably he would have pursued his purpose in a straight line but that his mind was arrested by a startling change in the heft and feeling of his burden.
It became suddenly so much heavier that he almost lost his balance. And as he looked to see what this could mean there rose out of Enoch a groan unlike any sound concerned with life. With that the body underwent a violent muscular commotion and threw itself into a state of rigid extension. Thane needed all his strength to hold it. Immediately there was another change. The body began slowly to go limp.
“It’s over,” said the Philadelphia alienist.
What Thane held in his arms was no longer Enoch, but a distasteful object, fallen in one breath from the first person I, from the second person you, to the state of a pronominal third thing which is spoken of—that!
Thane carried it back to the bed.
All of this had taken place in less than half an hour. Thane found Agnes as he had left her, on an iron bench in the maple shade.
“He is dead,” she said, on looking at him.
He answered by sitting by her side in silence.