Vashti's Fate — page 278: what you’re looking at

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

LIGHTNING-STRUCK: 273 CHAPTER XXXII. LIGHTNING-STRUCK, Professor Thorpe had never come to Everleigh since Vashti’s return thither. He had written often—long, im- passioned letters, that Vashti devoured in secret, and then — almost guiltily thrust in the fire, but never answered. At last came one proclaiming itself the last, bitterly | re- proaching her, and announcing his approaching departure for foreign lands. Though her heart felt as if in the grasp of a hand of iron, she never lifted her pen to say the word that she knew would stay him. After Frank’s death she seemed to have taken into her strange eyes the terror that in his had appeared invincible. Dr. Gracie looked at her often, saying inwardly : ‘‘T am afraid she will go as Frank did.” One day, several weeks after Frank's death, she was in the dining-room, looking over a newspaper after breakfast, when with a scream that fairly rent the ears it reached, she rose from her seat, took a few frantic steps from the table, and fell like a corpse upon the floor. They lifted her, the paper still in her rigid clasp, and bore her to her bed—unable to loosen the paper from her hand. ‘They tore it away, leaving a peAE RE I in her death- like grasp. All efforts at restoring her to consciousness proving un- availing, Dr. Gracie was sent for. Under the strong treatment he applied, she came slowly to herself,-opening her eyes soon, and, after a little, sitting up, but with the most horror-stricken expression of counte- nance it is possible to imagine, comic ,OOk