Her Faithful Knight — page 265: what you’re looking at

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

His Liege Lady. 261 place to-morrow, I must find some safe hiding place until it is all over and I know what is going to happen.” Clearly, she dreaded the exhumation of her sister’s body. It was not alone her love and reverence for the memory of the dead which drove the blood from her cheeks and lips and brought into her eyes that strange, hunted look of fear. She was afraid of the consequences of the exhumation to the full as much as she was horri- fied by the proposed desecration of the dead girl’s resting place. But Aylmer was vowed to her service and resolved to believe in her spotless innocence even if she should by her own mouth cast doubt upon it. “After to-morrow,’ she went on in the same restless way, “I shall know what to do. But until to-morrow I must hide myself.” The dread in her mind was that her personation of her sister might be discovered by Darcy Derrick when Phyllis’ dead body was brought to the light of day. She felt sick and faint with horror at the thought. To escape from him, to conceal herself had become her fixed desire and determination, and the hideous ceremony of the morrow, if it did not reveal her secret, would, at least, so she sup- posed, demonstrate the monstrous falseness of the charge — brought against her by the malice and disappointed greed of Darcy Derrick. She had little doubt that he had started this persecution in order to revenge himself upon the woman who had come between him and the fortune which would have been his had his wife died intestate. She did not for a moment suppose that even Darcy would really believe Phyllis capable of so foul a crime as her sister’s murder. Phyllis, from whom he had received nothing but tender- ness and love. That he should have dared to call in the law to assist his scheme of mean and cruel revenge seemed to Dorothy another proof that he was, as she had more AMUCCLEeKe) S (E) |