In these circumstances she was unwilling to leave
London though she had promised, and was hardly sorry to find an excuse in
her recognised illness.
And she was ill. Though her mind was again at work with schemes on which
she would not have busied herself without hope, yet she had not recovered
from the actual bodily prostration to which she had been compelled to give
way when first told of the robbery on her return from the theatre. There
had been moments then in which she thought that her heart would have
broken; moments in which, but that the power of speech was wanting, she
would have told everything to Lucinda Roanoke. When Mrs. Carbuncle was
marching up-stairs with the policemen at her heels she would willingly
have sold all her hopes, Portray Castle, her lovers, her necklace, her
income, her beauty, for any assurance of the humblest security. With that
quickness of intellect which was her peculiar gift, she had soon
understood, in the midst of her sufferings, that her necklace had been
taken by thieves whose robbery might assist her for a while in keeping her
secret, rather than lead to the immediate divulging of it.
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