Before any other alarm had struck
her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth gaped, her
throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the effort to
swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation while she
felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh, ready to
shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round white top.
Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm too! this was
an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her. She pulled it to
release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a lump descended,
and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her that a dead human
body was upon her.
At a quarter to four o'clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish
relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman's voice, in
piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which
were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep, in
obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered ten minutes
previously, with great urgency, by that gentleman's lacquey.
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