visit. But where
was he whom she looked for? There! The cloaked figure of a man was at
the corner of the street. It was he. Her heart froze; but her limbs
were strung to throw off the house, and reach air, breathe, and (as her
thoughts ran) swoon, well-protected. To her senses the house was a house
on fire, and crying to her to escape.

Yet she stepped deliberately, to be sure-footed in a dusky room; she
touched along the wall and came to the door, where a foot-stool nearly
tripped her. Here her touch was at fault, for though she knew she must
be close by the door, she was met by an obstruction unlike wood, and
the door seemed neither shut nor open. She could not find the handle;
something hung over it. Thinking coolly, she fancied the thing must be a
gown or dressing-gown; it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of the
touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk, and she felt at it
very carefully and mechanically, saying within herself, in her anxiety
to pass it without noise, 'If I should awake poor Chloe, of all people!'
Her alarm was that the door might creak. Before any other alarm had
struck her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth
gaped, her throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the
effort to swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation
while she felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh,
ready to shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round
white top. Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm
too! this was an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her.
She pulled it to release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a
lump descended, and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her
that a dead human body was upon her.

At a quarter to four o'clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish
relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman's voice, in
piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which
were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep,
in obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered ten minutes
previously, with great urgency, by that gentleman's lacquey. On
his reaching the street of the house inhabited by Duchess Susan, he
perceived many night-capped heads at windows, and one window of the
house in question lifted but vacant. His first impression accused the
pair of gentlemen, whom he saw bearing drawn swords