Her Faithful Knight — page 321: what you’re looking at

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

Tracked Down. 3r7 lady, who was wearing deep mourning, and looked very ill, had turned very red and seemed annoyed. She had been thinking so much of her sister, she said, that she had signed her name by accident, instead of her own, but it did not matter, and she would alter it by and bye. Cress- well and Miss Huddleston had then signed their names, and the latter, after receiving half a crown for her trouble, had left the house. All this, she positively asserted, oc- curred on the day following the funeral of Mrs. Derrick, whom she had never seen, yet to whose will her signature was found appended as a witness. | At this point the Hon. Darcy was recalled, and un- expectedly questioned by the coroner as to his relations with the deceased lady and her missing sister. Phyllis, he stated, was of a vindictive and jealous disposition. Through her influence misunderstandings had arisen be- tween himself and his wife, although, as he could show by a deed drawn up at Plymouth in the preceding year, he had settled a handsome income upon his sister-in-law to insure her silence and to keep her from troubling him. It was late in the afternoon before the coroner com- menced his summing up, and he did not fail to comment very strongly upon the unsatisfactory character of a great deal of the evidence, notably that of the deceased lady’s husband, which would tend to completely destroy any possible sympathy which might be felt with him in his bereavement. In the absence of either of the two wit- nesses to Mrs. Derrick’s death, and in the strange circum- stances of their flight and the forgery of the will by Phyllis Knight, following the evidence proving that it was she who purchased the laudanum found in the body of the deceased, and, further, that it was she who re- ceived the lawyer’s important letter in her sister’s absence, it was for the jury to decide—first, whether Dorothea Derrick came to her death by natural means; secondly, COMNIELOO S (E@)