The broken watch that still beats

The morning had again come round. A. dreamed that he had awakened about dawn, and, thinking of nothing but the hour to rise, had drawn his watch from under his pillow. In doing so he saw that it had been completely shattered. But how could it have been broken so violently, lying where it had been snugly placed a few hours before? A reasonable but an injurious conjecture occurred to him: at some time in the night the watch had been taken from beneath his pillow by his wife, who had allowed it to fall. Satisfied that there could be no other explanation, he was about to drop asleep again, to get rid of ill-humour at the accident (this is all in the dream, be it understood), when the door opened and in came a foreman of works to whom A. gave instructions every day, and between whom and himself there was a great liking. It seemed as if the man had come for the usual draft of work to be done, and it did not strike A. as anything out of the way that he should be visited in his bedroom for it. But he was struck by the mysterious look of inquiry on the man's face. The next moment he connected this look with the broken watch, and drew it out again; the glass gone, the hands swept from the dial, but seeming less like his own watch now. What was the meaning of it? While A. was asking himself the question in a sort of expectant trepidation, the foreman of works said, 'Put it to your ear, sir,' meaning, of course, the broken watch. This A. did; and as he listened to the even beat within, the other said, 'Sir, we know how much you are troubled, and this is our way of showing you that though every sign of life is destroyed life may still be going on.' Whereupon A. woke all of a tremble, heard the tranquil tick-ticking of his watch under his pillow, and when he could compose himself to take it forth, saw that the hands stood at within five or eight minutes of the time when his boy died on the same day in the calendar.