On the fifth day she
was worse; and on the sixth, she was too sleepy at one time, and too
light-headed at another, to be spoken to. The chemist (who did the
doctoring in those parts) had come and looked at her, and had said he
thought it was a bad fever. He had left a "saline draught," which
the woman of the house had paid for out of her own pocket, and had
administered without effect. She had ventured on searching the only box
which the lady had brought with her; and had found nothing in it but a
few necessary articles of linen--no dresses, no ornaments, not so much
as the fragment of a letter which might help in discovering her friends.
Between the risk of keeping her under these circumstances, and the
barbarity of turning a sick woman into the street, the landlady herself
had not hesitated. She would willingly have kept her tenant, on the
chance of the lady's recovery, and on the chance of her friends turning
up. But not half an hour since, her husband--who never came near the
house, except to take her money--had come to rob her of her little
earnings, as usual. She had been obliged to tell him that no rent was in
hand for the first floor, and that none was likely to be in hand until
the lady recovered, or her friends found her.
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