With a burst of gratitude, she exclaimed, clasping her hands together—
“Oh, my God, you have listened to my prayer! you have heard me, a sinner! you have spared her!”
Tears checked her voice, and she buried her face once more in the bed-clothes.
Lotte regarded her with surprise—as, indeed, she did the whole situation. She felt strangely weak and powerless. Had she been ill? What did it all mean? She repeated the question, in a low voice, and then Mrs. Bantom jumped up, and hurried to the medicine bottle. She poured out a dose, and said, as tenderly as if Lotte was her own child—
“There, drink that, like a good girl, and don’t ask a single question until you are stronger; it will be quite time enough to know all then.”
Lotte would have persisted, but Mrs. Bantom was peremptory, and she was obliged to succumb. Within ten minutes after the medicine had been administered, she was asleep.
The battle had been fought. Youth, constitution, and judicious treatment had won the victory. The abatement of the symptoms was as rapid as had been the attack of the fever, and in two days more Lotte was able to sit up in bed, and communing with herself, come to a full knowledge of the peculiarity and the distressing nature of her situation.
She had, in the interval between the crisis and the present moment, followed the directions of the doctor, obeyed his instructions, and swallowed his medicine with the intrepidity of a martyr. The result had been all that could be desired in her progress to health: fresh air was only needed to complete the rest.
How was that to be got at? How, at present, could she obtain more than came in at her window? She had no clothes; all had been destroyed at the fire, everything had been consumed, including the very little money she had. Her very first impulse had been, on coming to a sense of her position, to send for her brother Charley; but, alas! a fellow-clerk had embezzled upwards of a thousand pounds from the firm to which they both belonged, and had absconded. Charley had been at once charged to accompany a detective, engaged to pursue him, to America, and he had started on the very night of the fire. He was already on the Atlantic, leaving the shores of England at the rate of three hundred miles per day. He had despatched a hasty note to Lotte, informing her of the mission upon which he had been despatched, and directing her, should she require a little pecuniary assistance during his absence, to apply in his name to his firm, and it would be readily afforded her.
This letter she never got. Charley had slipped it into the letter-box of a post-office, on his way to the Euston station, and it was conveyed to its destination by the postman on the following morning. But as he was not able to deliver it, he returned to the Dead Letter Office, first carefully writing upon it, “House burnt down; gone away, not known where.”