The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

On the staircase a little boy of five and his baby sister of three were playing. Some one had given them a penny box of toys, and they were setting the things out on the stairs.

Not six months previously the body of a murdered woman lay on these stairs. It was there that her husband killed her. The man was hanged. The man was the father, the murdered woman was the mother of the children whom I saw playing last Christmas day on the stairs that had been stained with their mother's blood.

To a boarding-school in the north-west of London there came one day a lady dressed in deep mourning. With evident hesitation she told the head mistress that she wanted to place her two little girls at the school, as she had been ordered to a Continental Bad to undergo a course of treatment.

"But before I send my little girls," said the lady, "I shall have to reveal something to you which I must ask you to regard as in the strictest confidence."

Then the unhappy lady, nervous and ill at ease, stammered out her story. She was the widow of a man who had committed suicide at the very moment he was about to be arrested for a murder which was one of the most sensational cases of recent years.

The two children she wished to place at the boarding-school were this man's daughters. The name she and her children bore was a false one. Would the school-mistress, knowing the facts, take the children? The lady felt it would not be right to send them without letting the mistress know the truth.

The head mistress was greatly affected by the tears and the evident distress of her visitor, and when she had satisfied herself on certain points she took the little girls, who knew nothing of the tragedy, and did her best to make them happy in their new surroundings.

If you watch the young ladies of Miss —————'s well-known boarding-school in the big garden attached to the house, you will see two pretty, fair-haired girls playing gaily with their companions, and you will hear their childish laughter ring out again and again.

The pretty little fair-haired girls are the daughters of the murderer who committed suicide to avoid arrest.

On the bright autumn day that their mother was sentenced to death, three children dressed in deep mourning sat in the sunshine with their governess. They knew that their papa was dead, and that was why they were in black. They were told that their mamma was very, very ill—too ill for her children to be with her—and that she "might die." But the little ones had not the slightest idea that the mother who "might die" was accused of having killed their father. When the verdict had been given, and the sentence pronounced, the children were taken away by a relative and brought up under another name. The law did not in this instance "take its course." At the last moment there was a reprieve, and the death sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life.