Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HER ROYAL LOVER. 81 breast rested a Russian cross, that the devout hands of his brother had placed there. The commissary and the doctor bent over the un- fortunate victim. “Some light!” said the physician, briefly; and the curtains, religiously closed, were immediately drawn aside. This first examination, very summary moreover, proved that the vertebral column had been broken as if by a fall, and that in consequence, death, which had set in for several hours already, had been sudden. “From this fact,” added the physician, “two hypotheses may be deduced. Either this man has thrown himself voluntarily out of the window, and we are in the presence of an ordinary suicide, or he has fallen out accidentally, unless he has been thrown out by a criminal hand, and then we have to learn who the murderer is and seek for him; for if the cause escapes us, the effect is here undeniable, in all its horror.” At this accusation of suicide which was going to rest upon the memory of his brother, Vassili was indignant. | “Never, no never, Kassar has never killed him- self!” cried he, as much afflicted as outraged. “My poor brother had too much faith, too much piety to commit such a crime. Ah! doctor, if my brother has fallen from this window, some one has pushed him out, be convinced of that!” Vassili was still speaking when Mineleko, pale with that solemn pallor which covers the visage at the gravest moments of life, advanced toward the representative of justice and requested that he might be permitted to speak in his turn. Ecomichooks.com