"Lay your flowers over her now!... Constance, lay your flowers over her.... She is lying so cold and all alone ... and it is all so big here ... big as a church ... she is lying ... as if in a cold, damp church.... Lay flowers beside her...."
"What do you say, sir?"
"Yes ... lay flowers beside her ... lay flowers beside her ... Constance...."
"Won't you come away now?"
"Yes, yes, I'm coming...."
There, there she lay ... covered all over, with the sheet. She was nothing but a blue, motionless woman's shape ... under a sheet. Now ... flowers lay over the sheet: all the white flowers of his imagination. Now his fingers tore into little pieces the plank which he carried on his heart and strewed them in between the flowers: into such little, little pieces that they were as the petals of flowers ... and nothing more ... over the woman....
The voices called him.
"Yes, yes, I'm coming ... I'm coming...."
The voices lured him home, to bed; and he jogged on through the streets raining with dragon's blood....
When he reached home, Adeline at once sent for the doctor.... It was typhoid fever.