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Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help, help!" No answer Even the echoes flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful and incredible isolation

What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar hum of the metropolis now rose fro streets and miles on miles of habitations

Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seehed down on Beatrice like funeral-palls

Du of every perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering, back into the office There in the dust her foot struck soht it up and stared at it

"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things reth that some catastrophe, incredibly vast, soedy of its sweep, had desolated the world

"Oh, ?"

She did not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror racking her All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake as with an ague

Thus for anot which way to turn nor what to do Then her terror-stricken gaze fell on the doorway leading from her outer office to the inner one, the one where Stern had had his laboratory and his consultation-roo, a feorm-eaten planks and splintered bits of wood, barely supported by the rusty hinges

Toward it she staggered About her she drew the sheltering e; and to her eyes, womanlike, the hot tears mounted As she went, she cried in a voice of horror

"Mr Stern! Oh--Mr Stern! Are--are you dead, too? You can't be--it's too frightful!"

She reached the door The rated it Down in a cruh which a single sun-ray that entered the cobwebbed pane shot a radiant arrow

Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other roo of evil possessed her at thought of what she ht find there--yet more afraid was she of what she knew lay behind her

An instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting on the moldy jam Then, with a cry, she started forward--a cry in which terror had given place to joy, despair to hope