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"As I'm a living man, I do. Hold the camera a minute, and let me see."

He took the camera out of my hands, and I struck a lucifer. Its poor passing light lit up our corner of the room maybe for ten seconds before we were in the dark again. But the sight which we both saw is one which I shall never forget to my dying day. Miss More herself lay huddled up on the sofa, her left hand touching the floor, her right hand supporting her head. Her face was the face of one sleeping restfully, yet so pale and unearthly looking that I knew she was dead. And in death all the kindness and sweetness of her nature seemed written ten times over upon her placid features. It might have been a child lying there—a child that had died laughing into a mother's eyes.

For some seconds neither of us spoke. I never remember a minute like that when we stood dumb and trembling in the face of death, and the dark seemed to hide the whole of the awful truth from us. When at last my master opened his lips, his voice was like a whisper of a man in a vault.

"Run for help and a doctor," said he. "God grant we are dreaming!"

He staggered out with me to the door, and our cries brought the old hag from the porter's lodge. She had a lantern in her hand, and she and my master went back to the studio together. When I returned in ten minutes' time—a doctor at my heels—I found the two together chafing the dead woman's hands,