whether he believed in God. "I don't know. No, I don't think I do. Why
should one think of death when one is alive and well?"

Krafft laughed at this, with a pitying irony. "Happy you!" he said.
"Happy you!" His voice sank, and he continued almost fearfully: "I
have the vision of it before me, always wherever I go. Listen; I will
tell you; it is like this." He laid his hand on Maurice's arm, and
drew him nearer. "I know--no matter how strong and sound I may be at
this moment; no matter how I laugh, or weep, or play the fool; no
matter how little thought I give it, or whether I think about it all
day long--I know the hour will come, at last, when I shall gasp, choke,
grow black in the face, in the vain struggle for another single
mouthful of that air which has always been mine at will. And no one
will be able to help me; there is no escape from that hour; no
power on earth can keep it from me. And it is all a matter of chance
when it happens--a great lottery: one draws to-day, one to-morrow; but
my turn will surely come, and each day that passes brings me
twenty-four hours nearer the end." He drew still closer to Maurice.
"Tell me, have you never stood before a doorway--the doorway of some
strange house that you have perhaps never consciously gone past
before--and waited, with the atrocious curiosity that death and its
hideous paraphernalia waken in one, for a coffin to be carried out?--the
coffin of an utter stranger, who is of interest to you now, for
the first and the last time. And have you not thought to yourself,
with a shudder, that some day, in this selfsame way, under the same
indifferent sky, among a group of loiterers as idly curious as these,
you yourself will be carried out, feet foremost, like a bale of goods,
like useless lumber, all will and dignity gone from you, never to
enter there again?--there, where all the little human things you have
loved, and used, and lived amongst, are lying just as you left