Her Faithful Knight — page 282: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER XXVII. DOROTHYS CONFESSION. As Rosa finished reading, Aylmer, through the half- open door, gazed anxiously in at Dorothy. He feared she might faint, but Dorothy was a perfectly healthy nineteenth-century Englishwoman, and her heart was as physically sound as his own. She did not faint, but she was as bad an actress in private life as she had proved herself on the stage, and so she remained, with bent head, mechanically stroking the cat’s fur with her right hand, feeling all the while as though choking fingers grasped her throat. She scarcely heard Mrs. Read’s comments on the “Hammerstein Mystery.” She was half-dazed by the shock of realizing how strong circumstantial evidence would be against her. Reading that account,’ people would actually believe that she, Derothy, had murdered her sister for the sake of her aunt’s fortune! And the cruellest irony lay in the fact that it was her own plot which lent plausibility to the monstrous theory. It would seem to outsiders quite possible for a penniless girl to murder an heiress in order to inherit her money, whereas in her own person as Dorothy, to whom Mrs. Julius Knight’s fortune had been left, she would have no such incentive to crime. “T’m sure I hope they’ll catch those dreadful women.” It was Rosa who said this—Rosa, who would not have hurt a fly. CoORnnicloooks (C@)