“I must go down,” he thought. “It’s most likely that doctor come back, to make sure once more that the old man’s dead!”

Again the bell rang, this time with a long, continuous, jerking pull.⁠ ⁠…

Wolf glanced at the back of the sofa. There was no movement there, nor any sign. He went out on the landing and waited for a moment at the door of the dead man’s room, which they had left wide open. How different was the immobility of that form from the motionlessness of the one he had just left!

He listened to the silence, waiting for the bell to ring again. “Why is it,” he thought, “that I find it so hard to go down?” He moved to the head of the stairs. “Why do sounds like this,” he thought, “hit corpses in the face and outrage them like an indecency? Does death draw up to the surface some new kind of silence, to disturb which is a monstrous abuse?”