She hurried into the street with Mr. Pelham’s answer to Mrs. Holdfast’s note, and getting into a quiet nook, where she was free from observation, asked a girl to read it to her. Mr. Pelham had scarcely wetted the gum, and the envelope was easily unfastened. Fanny endeavoured to commit the letter to memory, but she failed; the girl who read it to her could not quite make out the words. The letter contained a demand for money, and Mr. Pelham said in it that before the week was out he must have a cheque for five hundred pounds. One remark Fanny perfectly remembered. “If you are going to turn niggardly and stingy,” wrote Mr. Pelham, “I shall have to keep the purse myself. Don’t forget that the money is as much mine as yours, more mine than yours indeed, and that I could ruin you with one word.”
Fanny says that when Mrs. Holdfast read the letter (which she delivered properly fastened) and came to those words—of course Fanny could only guess that—Mrs. Holdfast said aloud:
“And yourself, too, Pelham. It would go harder with you than with me.”
For a moment—only for a single moment, as I gather from Fanny—Mrs. Holdfast’s face grew haggard, but she became gay again instantly, and began to sing and talk lightly. Can such a nature as hers really feel?
Again, for the second time this week, Richard Manx has not come to his room in Great Porter Square. I make sure of this by putting the chain on the street door after mid-night. I attach importance to the slightest circumstance now, and do not allow anything to escape me. Do not for a moment let your courage and your hopefulness fail you. We have not yet obtained a tangible link to start from, but it appears to me as if events were coming closer; something will come to light presently which will assist in the discovery of your father’s murderer. You are never absent from my thoughts; you are for ever in my heart. I am yours till death.
[CHAPTER XXXV.]
FANNY DISCOVERS WHO RICHARD MANX IS.