Her Faithful Knight — page 245: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Dorothy’s Crime. 241 The door had scarcely closed on Cresswell when the post- man brought a letter for “Miss Phyllis Knight,” in the en- velope and writing with which Dorothy was now familiar as coming from the office of Messrs. Searle and Glyn. Anxiety made her rise and creep feebly down the stairs and the little garden path to the green gate, and the same feeling prompted her to tear open the envelope before she reached the house door. But at the sight of the first words every trace of color left her cheek; she stumbled rather than walked into the hall, and pushing open the door of the little parlor, fell, trembling and unnerved, on a chair. The lawyer wrote: Madame.—Will you kindly inform us, if possible by re- turn post, whether your sister, the late Mrs. Dorothea Der- rick, left anything in the nature of a will? As you are no doubt aware, the large fortune left to her by our client, Mrs. Julius Knight, will, if your sister has died intestate, become the sole property of her husband, the Hon. Darcy Derrick. The paper fell from Dorothy’s hands to the ground. There on that same sofa where the two sisters had sat locked in one another’s arms on that terrible night when Phyllis had sobbed out the story of her cruel desertion and betrayal, Dorothy was seated as she learned that, by her own action in confusing her identity with that of Phyllis, the man who had brought about her sister’s death was to succeed through that event to the bulk of her aunt’s fortune. Dorothy’s brain reeled at the thought. There was no ~ one in the whole world to whom she could turn for ad- vice; she knew nothing of the law, she was alone in the house, she was pitiably weak and even a little light-headed as a result of long weeping, sleeplessness and fasting. But she had to pit her woman’s ingenuity against this Eomicsoo KS) (<(©)