"Oh! I b-b-believe he's alive!" he stammered.
"He's alive! He's alive!" muttered the young people, keeping with difficulty their excitement within bounds.
Maître Delarue's legs were so shaky that he had to sit down on the foot of the bed. He murmured again and again:
"A devilish business! We've no right——"
They kept looking at one another with troubled faces. The idea that this dead man was alive—for he was dead, undeniably dead—the idea that this dead man was alive shocked them as something monstrous.
And yet was not the evidence that he was alive quite as strong as the evidence that he was dead? They believed in his death because it was impossible that he should be alive. But could they deny the evidence of their own eyes because that evidence was against all reason?
Dorothy said:
"Look: his chest rises and falls—you can see it—ever so slowly and ever so little. But it does. Then he is not dead."
They protested.
"No.... It's out of the question. Such a phenomenon would be inexplicable."