This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1898 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX THE WOMAN AND THE MAN VES--the woman was dead. Ballingall had gone--and the fortune was found. Put in that way, it was a curious sequence of events. Indeed, put in any way, there could be no doubt about the oddity of the part which the woman had played. Medical examination clearly showed that death had come to her from natural causes. She must, the doctor said, have been within a hand'sbreadth of death for, at any rate, the last twelve months. He declared that every vital organ was hopelessly diseased. Asked if the immediate cause of death was shock, he replied that there was nothing whatever in the condition of the body which could be regarded as supporting such a theory. In his opinion, the woman had burned out, like a candle, which, when it is all consumed, dies. Nothing, in his judgment, could have retarded the inevitable end; just as there was nothing to suggest that it came one instant sooner than might, in the natural course, have been expected. That was what the doctor said in public, at the coroner's inquest. He listened to them when, in private, they told him the strange story of the night's adventure, pronouncing at the conclusion an opinion which contained in it the essence of all wisdom, for it might be taken any way. The gist of it was this. Very probably for some time before her death, the woman had been light-headed. When people are lightheaded they suffer from hallucinations. It was quite possible that, in her case, those hallucinations had taken the form--literally--of her injured husband. It was on record that hallucinations had taken form, in similar cases. It was a perfectly feasible and reasonable theory which supposed that the woman, wandering, a homeless outcast, in the streets of London, delirious, premonitions of her ap...