the power to speak.

They laid him on his bed, sent for doctors and went to tell Lady
Dedlock, but she had disappeared.

Almost at one and the same moment the unhappy woman had learned not only
that the detective had told his story to Sir Leicester, but that she
herself was suspected of the murder. These two blows were more than she
could bear. She put on a cloak and veil and, leaving all her money and
jewels behind her, with a note for her husband, went out into the
shrill, frosty wind. The note read:

"If I am sought for or accused of his murder, believe I am wholly
innocent. I have no home left, I will trouble you no more. May you
forget me and forgive me."

They gave Sir Leicester this note, and great agony came to the stricken
man's heart. He had always loved and honored her, and he loved her no
less now for what had been told him. Nor did he believe for a moment
that she could be guilty of the murder. He wrote on a slate the words,
"Forgive--find," and the detective started at once to overtake the
fleeing woman.

He went first to Esther, to whom he told the sad outcome, and together
they began the search. For two days they labored, tracing Lady Dedlock's
movements step by step, through the pelting snow and wind, across the
frozen wastes outside of London, where brick-kilns burned and where she
had exchanged clothes with a poor laboring woman, the better to elude
pursuit--then back to London again, where at last they found her.

But it was too late. She was lying frozen in the snow, at the gate of
the cemetery where Captain Hawdon, the copyist whom she had once loved,
lay buried.

So Lady Dedlock's secret was hidden at last by death. Only the
detective, whose business was silence, Sir Leicester her husband, and
Esther her daughter, knew what her misery had been or the strange
circumstances of her flight, for the police soon succeeded in tracing
the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn to Hortense, the revengeful French maid
whom he had threatened to put in prison.

One other shadow fell on Esther's life before the clouds cleared away
for ever.

Grandfather Smallweed, rummaging among the papers in Krook's shop, found
an old will, and this proved to be a last will made by the original
Jarndyce, whose affairs the Court of Chancery had been all these years
trying to settle. This will bequeathed the greater part of the fortune
to Richard Carstone, and its discovery, of course, would have put a stop
to the famous suit.