Blind Love

Fanny thought the suggestion worth adopting. After careful

consideration, she drew up an advertisement:-"Fanny H. to L--H--. I have not been able to ascertain your address.

Please write to me, at the Post Office, Hunter Street, London, W.C."

She paid for the insertion of this advertisement three times on

alternate Saturdays. They told her that this would be a more likely way

than to take three successive Saturdays. Then, encouraged by the

feeling that something, however little, had been done, she resolved to

sit down to write out a narrative in which she would set down in order

everything that had happened--exactly as it had happened. Her intense

hatred and suspicion of Dr. Vimpany aided her, strange to say, to keep

to the strictest fidelity as regards the facts. For it was not her

desire to make up charges and accusations. She wanted to find out the

exact truth, and so to set it down that anybody who read her statement

would arrive at the same conclusion as she herself had done. In the

case of an eye-witness there are thousands of things which cannot be

produced in evidence which yet are most important in directing and

confirming suspicions. The attitude, the voice, the look of a speaker,

the things which he conceals as well as the things which he

reveals--all these are evidence. But these Fanny was unable to set

down. Therefore it behoved her to be strictly careful.

First, she stated how she became aware that there was some secret

scheme under consideration between Lord Harry and the doctor. Next, she

set down the fact that they began to talk French to each other,

thinking that she could not understand them; that they spoke of

deceiving Lady Harry by some statement which had already deceived the

authorities; that the doctor undertook to get the lady out of the

house; that they engaged herself as nurse to a sick man; that she

suspected from the beginning that their design was to profit in some

way by the death of this sick than, who bore a slight resemblance to

Lord Harry himself. And so on, following the story as closely as she

could remember, to the death of the Dane and her own subsequent

conversation with the nurse. She was careful to put in the dates, day

after day. When she had done all this--it took a good deal of time--she

bought a manuscript book and copied it all out. This enabled her to

remember two or three facts which had escaped her at the beginning.

Then she made another copy this time without names of people or place.

The second copy she forwarded as a registered letter to Mrs. Vimpany,

with a letter of which this was the conclusion: "Considering,

therefore, that on Wednesday morning I left Lord Harry in perfect

health; considering that on the Thursday morning I saw the man who had

been ill so long actually die--how, I have told you in the packet

enclosed; considering that the nurse was called in purposely to attend

a patient who was stated to have long been ill--there can be no doubt

whatever that the body in the cemetery is that of the unfortunate Dane,

Oxbye; and that, somewhere or other, Lord Harry is alive and well.