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Updated: June 26, 2025
Then she turned, mounting the steps, pensively; and, in the doorway, paused an instant, looking back at him over her shoulder. And all that night, lying close to the verge of slumber, I heard Sir George pacing the stony yard under the great stars; while the riflemen, stretched beside the hearth, snored heavily, and the death-watch ticked in the wall.
No sooner would one cease than another would begin; and so it would go on, demand and response, strophe and antistrope; and at intervals several voices would unite in a kind of low mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss; while I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled.
When the night was exceeding cold and one who has not felt it can hardly imagine the bitter, killing intensity of a northern midnight in February the wolves, instead of going away, would wait under the tree in which the lynx had taken refuge, and the silent, appalling death-watch began. A lynx, though heavily furred, cannot long remain exposed in the intense cold without moving.
"It comes kind o' muffled like through the chimbly a person might be mistaken if they was upset in their nerves considerable." "What old people call the 'death-watch' is supposed to be an insect that lives in the walls of old houses, isn't it? and gives warning with a ticking sound when somebody is going to be called away?
Ah, well, they will be sicker than I at the end of the affair. As I sit here and muse on it all, the footfalls of the death-watch going up and down outside my cage, the man's suspicious eyes ever peering in on me, almost I weary of eternal recurrence. I have lived so many lives.
For when the strain was off, and there was no one by to see or hear save my good-hearted death-watch, I must needs go down upon my knees beside the bed in childish weakness, and sob and choke and let the hot tears come as I had not since at this same bedside I had knelt a little lad to take my mother's dying love.
The death-watch extends from England to Cashmere, and across India diagonally to the remotest nook of Bengal, over a three thousand miles' distance from the entrance of the Indian Punjaub. A hare crossing a man's path on starting in the morning, has been held in all countries alike to prognosticate evil in the course of that day.
Aubin's Bay with his pale freight, carried it on his shoulders up to the little house where he had lived so many years. There he kept the death-watch alone. Guida knew nothing of the arrest and trial of Mattingley until he had been condemned to death.
I know, too, what's a-coming to pass when the death-watch goes thump, thump, thumping in the wall right over my head the whole blessed night. And more than that, I was a-looking for both these true signs of bad luck before I heard 'em. That big black ring round the comet's head that I've seen for a night or two back told me plain enough what to expect.
"'If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now," she answered, insensibly finding it easier to use another's words than to coin phrases while holding death-watch over a continent. They sat down on the boulder. After what seemed like countless hours, she said, "I wonder how long we have been here. Perhaps it is years." He looked at his watch.
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