Having tapped gently at the door, which was slowly opened to him by the lodging-house-keeper herself—
"How is your patient to-night, lady?" he said, addressing the latter, smilingly.
"She is well, sir—she is well," replied the woman, in whom Fanny's gentle nature and hard fate—of which she, too, had gathered something during the unfortunate girl's fits of delirium—had excited a strong feeling of sympathy. "She is well!—she is well!" she said, wiping her eyes with her apron as she spoke. "She's in heaven, sir!"
"What!" exclaimed Raeburn, in a tone of voice startling from its hollowness, and becoming deadly pale; his mean and dastardly soul instantly sinking under the weight of guilt with which he felt this dreadful intelligence burdening it. "What! she's not dead?"
"But she is though," replied the woman; "and there's an avenging God above that will seek out and make a terror and example of those who have been the cause of this poor girl's death."
"What do you mean, woman?" said Raeburn, in an alarm which he could not conceal, and which the slightest allusion to his villany was now sufficient to excite to an overwhelming degree; "you do not mean to say that she died by violence?"
"I know what I know, Mr Raeburn," rejoined the lodging-house-keeper, "and that's all I have to say about the matter." And she turned into the house.
Having by no means any wish to renew the conversation, Raeburn availed himself of the opportunity presented by the woman's retiring into the house, to sneak off, which he did, and joined his friend Cressingham, who was waiting for him at a little distance.
"She's dead, Cressingham!—she's dead!" he said, in great agitation, as he approached the latter.
"Dead!" exclaimed Cressingham—"is it possible? Why, then, Harry, your £5000 are gone, and you have been a villain for nothing."