lf posted the two letters,
the one to Edward Jacobs and the other to Dudley, which brought them to
the place on the same day. How she herself was sent out of the way on
that occasion, and returned in time to witness, through the hole in the
floor above, the stooping over the body by Dudley, and his drawing back
covered with blood, which she took for the actual murder. How Mrs. Higgs
and Dudley had then left the house together, while she was too sick with
fright to move. How she had remained outside the house until she saw
Max; and how, when he was gone, and Mrs. Higgs had come back, she found
that the manner of the supposed old woman had changed toward her and
grown unbearably cruel and harsh. How she had been left for days and
nights by herself, until she resolved to bear it no longer. And how,
when Mrs. Higgs had sent her to Dudley's chambers with the message about
Dick Barker, she had told her never to come back again.

Carrie added that she herself had always been treated with kindness, not
only by the gang, of whom, indeed, they saw little, but by such of the
men and boys on the barges which came to the wharf as knew her, and
"winked" at her unauthorized tenancy of the deserted house.

In broad daylight, in the company of half a dozen policemen, Max and
Dudley revisited the house together. They found the holes in the wall
through which "Mrs. Higgs" took stock of Max on the occasion of his
first visit; they tested the ingenious device by means of which the
middle boards in the front shop could be made to fall and deposit
anything laid upon them in the tunnel beneath. They found the hole in
which Mrs. Higgs had stepped, and the pole which had been used to
underpin the middle boards. This hole extended under the floor of the
kitchen, so that by creeping under the flooring from the one room to the
other the pole could be withdrawn or replaced without the knowledge of a
person in the front room.

This final discovery explained to Max the manner in which the body of
Jacobs had been made to disappear while he himself was in the room with
it.

The gang, of which the illustrious Dick Barker had formed one, had
wisely disappeared, never to return.

But one day, when Carrie, in her nurse's dress, was walking along Oxford
Street, in the company of Max, to whom, with Mr. Wedmore's permission,
she was now engaged, she felt a hand in her pocket, and turning quickly,
found that she was having her purse stolen, "for auld lang