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Fifty Candles

IV

As I stood there with Henry Drew’s dead body at my feet and those silly candles flaring wanly at my side, I heard the big clock in the hallway strike the half-hour, and then the scurry of feet on the stairs. Cleared now of its first amazement, my mind was unusually keen. Henry Drew done for at last! By whom? Again my eye fell upon the open French window, and stepping to it I looked out. My heart stopped beating—for amid the shadows and the fog I thought I saw a blacker shadow, which passed in the twinkling of an eye.

I stepped quickly from the room. The light from the window at my back penetrated a few feet only on a narrow

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