'Oh, mamma! oh, mamma!' said she, apparently unable to move, and certainly all but unable to stand.
'Tell us, Mrs. Richards, what is it—what has happened to Mr. Tudor?' and as she spoke Mrs. Woodward got up and passed her arm around her younger daughter's waist—Linda also got up and joined the group.
'Why, ma'am,' said Mrs. Richards, 'he's been took by the bailiffs, and now he's in prison.'
Katie did not faint. She never had fainted, and probably did not know the way; but she clenched her hands still tighter, breathed harder than before, and repeated her appeal to her mother in a voice of agony. 'Oh, mamma! oh, mamma!'
Katie had no very accurate conception of what an arrest for debt meant. She knew that next to death imprisonment was the severest punishment inflicted on erring mortals, and she now heard that Charley was in prison. She did not stop to think whether it was for his life, or for some more limited period. It was enough for her to know, that this terrible misfortune had come upon him, to him who, to her young fancy, was so bright, so good, so clever, so excellent, upon him who had saved her life—upon him whom she so dearly loved.
'Oh, mamma! oh, mamma!' she said, and then in agony she shut her eyes and shuddered violently.
Mrs. Woodward was greatly afflicted. She was indeed sorry to hear such tidings of Charley Tudor; but her grief was now deeper even than that. She could not be longer blind to the sort of feeling which her child evinced for this young man; she could not think that these passionate bursts of overpowering sorrow were the result of mere childish friendship; she could not but see that her Katie's bosom now held a woman's heart, and that that heart was no longer her own.
And then Mrs. Woodward reflected of what nature, of what sort, was this man whom she had allowed to associate with her darling, almost as a brother does with his sister; whom she had warmed in her bosom till he had found an opportunity of inflicting this deadly wound. With terrible bitterness she upbraided herself as she sat down and bade Mrs. Richards go on with her tale. She knew that nothing which could now be said would add to Katie's anguish.
Mrs. Richards' story was soon told. It simply amounted to this—that 'Mister Charley,' as she always called him, had been arrested for debt at the suit of a tailor, and that she had learnt the circumstances from the fact of the prisoner having sent for his brushes.
'And so I thought the best thing was to come and tell Mr. Norman,' said Mrs. Richards, concluding her speech.