His Other Wife: A Novel — page 331: what you’re looking at

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

FATHER LOUIS’ STORY. 323 of these pages pursued his scientific researches as far as I was led to do from the hints thus derived, the ordeal of this day would not have been inflicted upon a civilized community.” . Here Father Louis returned the old book to Mr. Craig, and was provided with another smaller and less antiquated one, from which he read aloud as follows: “Although it is quite true that this drug (alluding to the essential oil of the desert plants mentioned in the Persian volume) does. in some cases, and under certain conditions of the body, produce a syncope or trance undistinguishable from death, it is of without its revealing properties even when the patient has been re- stored to life and comparative heaith. For those who die under its effects, a blackened and distorted carcass attests almost instantly the instrumentality and nature of the poison used, In those who recover, the traces of its dread passage through the blood remain in the whitened hair, from which the coloring matter has been utterly sub- tracted never to be restored; in the shrunken and parch- ment-like skin, to which neither time nor treatment will give back the hue of health, and the enfeebled organism that performs its functions laboriously and painfully to the end of its existence, which may or may not be a long one; and, lastly, in a certain singular and almost inde- scribable brilliancy.in the eyes, perhaps intensified by the absence of color in the lashes and brows, which, like the hair, are left of a dead white shade. This brilliancy as- sy | Comichoo <Si: (E(@)