After her husband’s death she was sought after and patronised by the upper classes in a way that not only astonished her but numbers of others besides.
In fact she was more popular than ever. Although the bloom on the peach had long since disappeared, and the springtime of her life had passed away, she was still a beautiful woman, and was capable of making herself very agreeable in society.
In addition to all this there was a halo of romance cast upon her—her career had been a most remarkable one—that was pretty generally admitted, but the culminating point was reached when her husband was accused of a murder committed years before his marriage with Hester Teige.
Mr. Shearman and his confederates were miserably disappointed when they heard of Doctor Bourne’s suicide.
No end of trouble and money had been expended in getting up the case against the guilty doctor; and it certainly was very mortifying to the American detective to find himself “cornered,” as he termed it, by that “artful cuss.”
Mr. Shearman was baulked just as his prey was about to fall into his hands.
It would have been quite a triumph for him to have escorted Bourne to the States, proved his guilt, and had him executed.
However, as he could not pot his man, he contented himself while in this country in seeing all the sights he possibly could in the great metropolis, and these, as the reader can imagine, were not a few.
Mrs. Bourne looked very well in her widow’s weeds, which, however, she purposed throwing off as early as custom and the usages of society would admit.
She had not been very long in her new quarters before she determined upon paying a visit to Rawton’s friend, her object being to leave a sum of money for the gipsy with Mr. Thompson.