Her Faithful Knight — page 286: what you’re looking at

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

282 Dorothy’s Confession. about my sister’s death,” she said, “and it is more than generous of you to believe all I say. What I want to tell you is that I was not in the house at the time; only she and Cresswell were there, and my sister was quite alone when she died. Cresswell thought she heard her cry out, and going in she found my poor darling on the floor dead. She had cut her head in falling, making a terrible wound from which the blood was flowing. She had known she could not live long, and only that afternoon had talked to me so sweetly and so pathetically, begging me to for- give her for having deceived me about the laudanum.” “About the laudanum ?” “Yes. She had suffered terribly from neuralgia, and had got into the way of taking it when I was out to induce sleep. That is why she quarreled with Dr. Morgan, who had attended her all the time, and we had to get another doctor.” “But that sienel says you bought the loucasm.* “Yes. It was a mistake.” She paused. Should she reveal her identity to him, she wondered ? “That mistake is very important,” he said. “T was in a house five minutes’ walk away,’ Dorothy went on, “but I heard my sister’s death-cry in my heart, and I rushed out. As soon as I reached the street I ran against that man Sergius Trevelyan, and he followed me as I fled to the house. I feel convinced, from footmarks we found in the garden mould close about the window, that he had peered into the house, and that the shock of seeing him killed my sister. And all the time that she lay dead the lawyer’s letter, which was the first inti- mation we had about my Aunt Dorothea’s fortune, was left unopened upon the table in the dining-room. I was half mad with grief, and I knew nothing about it until COMNICOOKS (E@)