Page:Lady Anne Granard 3.pdf/217

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LADY ANNE GRANARD.
215

in case the threat took place, or how it would act, she could not conceive.

Fanchette, in extreme alarm, asked innumerable questions as to the "vilain law of England," and received, of course, false and exaggerated accounts, in consequence of which she sent the page for a coach, and began to fetch down box after box with so much avidity, that cook took the liberty of peeping into several and handing them into the dining-room, observing, "it was quite as well for my ladies' fal-lals to pay her debts as be trotted off that way." Fanchette began to insist on their restoration, on which she was told, "that, if she attempted touching one of them, she would be immediately put in the hands of a policeman;" so she set out with amazing rapidity, exclaiming bitterly against the gensdarmes, whom she saw by chance at the moment. Meantime, poor Helen stood by her mother's bed-side, the image of despair, now looking at the pale invalid, who slept apparently in great comfort, and now on the writing-desk, which contained that money she so wanted, but must not, dared not take; the most terrible part of the affair being the declaration of the servant, "that an execution in a house was the most disgracefullest of all