The Impostor by Edgar Saltus

"Oh! Miss Marcy -- "

At the cry, Camille, who was dressed for a run, stopped and turned.

In the hall, hurrying after her, was her maid, Margaret. As Camille stopped, she stopped also.

"What is it?"

But Margaret, her mouth working, made no reply.

"What is it? " Camille, perplexed at the mummery, impatiently repeated.

"Oh, Miss Marcy, Archibald's on the floor. He -- "

Camille hurried by her and on and beyond to the extreme end of the apartment. There, in a little room which she had not seen since she first took the flat, the withered servant lay in a heap, the eyes staring, the face mottled, one corner of the mouth lifted as a dog's when about to bite, and with things wrapped in paper beside him.

Camille looked in and bit her lip. Her tender heart reproached her. Only a little since she had said -- and crossly enough -- that she would not be sorry to lose him and now she had, or at least she supposed so, but she could not be sure; it might be but a fit of some kind, and she hurried back to the other end of the apartment, where she telephoned and waited until at last Dix appeared.

Telling him what little she could, she sent him in with the maid for guide, and that only because she was young and, to those that are, death, instead of being the normal interruption that it is, always suggests something spectral.

She was still in the hall when Dix returned.

"Cerebral hemorrhage," he told her, and together they entered the drawing room.

In the physician's hands were two packages, which he put on the piano.

"I can't say I did not expect it," he resumed. "He has been in to see me several times. He had nephritis -- and other things."

Camille sighed.

"I am very sorry, He was queer, but he was faithful."

"It's difficult to be that and not the other," Dix, with frank cynicism, replied. "I'll have an undertaker come and -- "

"You say he had things the matter with him?"

"Yes, his conscience was affected. It was that that made him what you describe as queer. For the last few months, he has lived in a panic, and there are few toxins more depressive than fear."

"Why, what on earth had he to be afraid of?"