What he had found was a photograph, which had slipped from the leaves of the Bible, and at sight of the face, of which he only had a glimpse, every drop of blood seemed to leave his heart and came surging to his brain, making him so giddy and wild that he did not realise what he was doing when he hid away the picture until he could examine it by himself.  Once in his pocket he dared not take it out, although he raised his hand two or three times to do so, but was as often deterred by the thought that everybody would think that he had intended to hide it and suspect his motive.  So he kept quiet and saw them examine the book, the blank page of which had been torn half off, leaving only the last three letters of what must have been the owner’s name, ’——­ich’—­that was all, and might as well not have been there, for any light it shed upon the matter.

Opening the book by chance at 1st Corinthians, 2nd chapter, Mr. St. Claire, who could read German much better than he could speak it, saw pencil-marks around the ninth verse, and read aloud: 

    ’Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the
    heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love
    Him.’

On the margin opposite this verse was written, in a girlish hand: 

    ‘Think of me as there when you read this, and do not be sorry.’

A lock of soft, golden hair, which might have been cut from a baby’s head, and a few faded flowers, which still gave forth a faint perfume like heliotrope, were tied with a bit of thread, and lying between the leaves.  And except that the book was full of marked passages, chiefly comforting and conciliatory, there was nothing more to indicate the character of the owner.

‘If this Bible were hers, she was a good woman,’ Mr. St. Claire said, laying his hand reverently upon the forehead of the dead, while Frank, who saw another meaning between the lines, shook like one in an ague fit, for he did not believe that those hands, so pulseless and cold, had ever traced the words, ’Think of me as there when you read this, and do not be sorry.’  She who wrote them might be, and probably was dead, but her grave was far away, and the fact did not at all change the duty which he owed to her and him for whom the message was intended.

‘What shall I say to Arthur, and how shall I tell him,’ he was wondering to himself, when Mr. St. Claire roused him by saying: 

’You seem greatly unstrung by what has happened.  I never saw you look so ill.’

’Yes, I feel as if I had murdered her by not sending John to the station,’ Frank stammered, glad to offer this as an excuse for his manner, which he knew must seem strange and unnatural.

’You are too sensitive altogether.  John might not have seen her, she hurried off so fast, and you have no particular reason to think she was coming here,’ Mr. St. Claire said, adding:  ’We’d better leave her now.  We can do nothing more until the coroner comes, which will hardly be to-day.  I hear the roads are all blocked and impassable.  Let everything remain in the trunk where he can see them.’