Page:The Rejuvenation Of Miss Semaphore.pdf/209

 would not suffer him to be shown into the drawing-room. It was with a sense of having been through all this before, that Prudence read that "Victoria, by the Grace of God, Queen," summoned her to give evidence at the Arrow Street Police Court, on the ensuing Monday morning, "in the case of the Queen v. Sarah Anne Brown, otherwise," &c., &c.

"Well, the worst had come, and she would go through with it somehow. What awaited her when the trial was over she did not venture to speculate. That she had come within the clutches of the law she did not doubt, and her future loomed vague and dreadful. Where could she go if she escaped prison? Her name would be in every paper, her story on every lip. Even the lady who sold the Water of Youth had never heard of a case of a grown, an elderly person, being transformed into a baby by its effects. She foresaw that it would be generally believed that she had got rid of Augusta, and that the baby was—but who or what the baby might be considered was a point on which she absolutely refused to speculate.

Long after the man from Scotland Yard