And he stayed--all the night long.
The lamps went out; the rats came and ran across the floor; as the
hours crept on through midnight and past, the cold intensified and the
air of the room grew like ice. August did not move; he lay with his
face downward on the golden and rainbow hued pedestal of the household
treasure, which henceforth was to be cold for evermore, an exiled
thing in a foreign city in a far-off land.
Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers came down the stairs
and let themselves out, each bearing his lantern and going to his work
in stone-yard and timber-yard and at the salt-works. They did not
notice him; they did not know what had happened.
A little later his sister came down with a light in her hand to make
ready the house ere morning should break.
She stole up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder timidly.
"Dear August, you must be frozen. August, do look up! do speak!"
August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sullen look in them that
she had never seen there. His face was ashen white: his lips were like
fire. He had not slept all night; but his passionate sobs had given
way to delirious waking dreams and numb senseless trances, which had
alternated one on another all through the freezing, lonely, horrible
hours.
"It will never be warm again," he muttered, "never again!"
Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands.
"August! do you not know me!" she cried, in an agony. "I am Dorothea.
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