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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: what was in it he had mechanically unfolded and then dropped it.
Before he went to bed he took it up, and this time, at the top of a
paragraph, he was caught by five words that made him start. He
stood staring, before the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague,
K.C.B.," the man who ten years earlier had been the nearest of his
friends and whose deposition from this eminence had practically
left it without an occupant. He had seen him after their rupture,
but hadn't now seen him for years. Standing there before the fire
he turned cold as he read what had befallen him. Promoted a short
time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton
Hague had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness
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