I bowed, trembling with impatience, and still cold at heart, spite of his words, with the dread that had been mine since I heard of those photographs. He put on his spectacles, and, laying his hand upon the envelope upon his knee, looked at me with magnified eyes. 'It is very wonderful,' said he, 'that your young lady should have been left in a wreck close to the place where my poor child's body was met with.' Captain Strutt, with a sudden fidget of his whole figure, said, 'Mr. Hoskins, will you show Mr. Moore the portraits?' But the old gentleman must first look at them himself. He pulled them out and surveyed them with a countenance of mourning, one in either hand, his underlip working garrulously, and again and again he sighed, till, lifting my eyes from the portraits to his face, I saw that his cheeks were wet. Then, but with one of his patient gestures, he put the pictures together and extended them to me. I looked first at one, then at the other; the likenesses were not Marie. I could allow for the changes caused by drowning, by immersion, by the month-long action of spirits or brine; and still, with a wild throb of joy that half choked me, I saw that the likenesses were not Marie. They were two dreadful portraits of one face, dreadful to look upon; one in profile, the other full, the body manifestingly having been turned to confront the camera. The whiteness of the face in the pictures was as shocking a part as any: the cheeks were so sunk you would have thought she had sucked in her breath, with horrid scorn, a living woman, when the lens of the instrument was turned upon her. They had swept her hair off her brow for a clear view of the face; I supposed it was pale hair by the look of it, but it was not Marie's--it was not grown low on the forehead as hers was; the eyebrows were not hers--they were too thick; the ears were too large for Marie's, and, which convinced me absolutely, the shape of the nose was not my dear one's; no wasting by the action of rolling water, no shrinkage by long immersion, whether in brine or spirits, could work any structural change in the nose. I have those dreadful photographs in my mind's eye now, I cannot express their ghastliness. It was not only the forehead rendered naked by the manner in which the hair had been swept back by the artist, nor a more terrible sort of blindness in the droop and rigidity of the upper lids than anything to be imagined in death's cold glazing of the balls of vision, nor the meaninglessness in the look of the mouth, as though it had been some wild man's carving of a grin on an idol, neither human nor yet of the beast most sickening. The deep and subtle horror I found in that face was there through fancy of the terrific ocean solitude it had floated in, the icy surge that had tossed it, the pitiless stars which had looked down upon it, the roaring blasts of sleet and hail which had thundered over it.