The Argosy — page 172: what you’re looking at

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

158 What Our Advertisement Brought. room. I remember creeping down the stairs behind Mr. Hall, while I thanked him in my heart for never mentioning a light. I remember the utter silence with which he gave me his own slippers, and let me out into the chill, wet street. And then to think of me! Standing at my own door in the middle of the night ; in my dressing-gown and Mr. Hall’s slippers, tapping a long prompt natural knock, and waiting for what might follow. Would it be admittance, or a cry of murder, or what would it be ? I wondered as I stood there shivering as if with ague (for one generally wonders at a time of the keenest dread if only a moment of inaction intervenes) whether anyone else in all the quiet sleeping street had ever spent such a night as this ; wondering what the policeman would say to me when he passed, as he would—as he must in about another moment; won- dering how soon we could sell our furniture and let our house and go away where I could hide myself on some lone mountain-side, where this story could never reach. A fit of coughing interrupted this arrangement. How many hours ago was it I had knocked? Had I better rap again? Surely the day must be dawning. Surely by now the marauder must have killed both my gallant, brave preservers, and escaped in safety through the garden ? Interminable as this waiting time had seemed to me, the morning had not dawned ; the policeman even had not passed ; when our door was opened to me by Deborah herself—alive, and apparently unmaimed, but as white as a sheet. At first we intended to faint in each other’s arms, but something prevented us—a call to us from the bed-room on the first floor. “T heard the sounds in that room,” explained Deborah, excitedly amid her tears, as I put on a waterproof in the hall, “‘and I thought it was you, and went down. I couldn’t wake Ann, though I tnied all the time I was dressing. And then, when I went to the door, they— they told me they’d got him safe—the murderer—in the dark there. Oh ! Lavinia, I shall never sleep again. And they sent me to open the door to you; and—and ” We had reached the bedroom by this time, and found that the gas had been lighted ; and there, sitting right under it, tied in his chair, and guarded by Mr. Hall and his friend, sat the rufhan burglar: If ever there were in the world two women who might have been knocked down by one feather, those two women were Deborah and I; for this robber and marauder was the elderly gentleman who had called in answer to our advertisement; the elderly gentleman who had been anxious that his young friend should find a comfortable, airy home with us; the elderly gentleman who had been particular about the plate and linen ! | Deborah told all this in a breath, begging me to be calm;,but:she might more naturally have begged this of Mr. Hall and Mr. Fielding conmicbooks (C(O) in —_)