Now, being winter time, there was a blazing fire in the room, and my father, who was at this time laid up with the gout, would draw himself up to it and smoke his yard of clay. He was absent from the parlour when we entered, but we found his chair ready placed for him. "Good heavens! Molly, what's this?" cried Claribel, in alarm, as she touched the mantelpiece over the fireplace. "Can it be? No; yes, it _is_--_the waxen image molten away_! Who can have done it? Oh, wretched being that I am! Go, and at once, to the house of John, and inquire after his health." I was preparing to execute her commission, and was just upon setting out alone to John's house, which was not far from our own, when one of the neighbours, a woman--one of the most notorious gossips of the place, whose sole delight was to be the first to deliver bad news--met me at the door as I was just going out. "Oh, Molly my dear, have you heard the sad news? Lack-a-day! who'd have thought it? Oh, lauk-a-daisy-me! poor Claribel! how she will take on about it to be sure!" "Speak out, woman!" cried Claribel, from the parlour, for she had heard every word through the open door. "Speak out. What has happened?" "Oh Lord! my dear, that poor young man John Archer, as you appears to have been so fond of well, my dear, he's gone--yes, _dead_, struck down by a sudden fever, they say--in the very spring-time of his youth; it's hardly a quarter of an hour since, so I thought I'd come at once to tell you." This communication, partly interrupted by sobs and partly by want of breath, for the bearer of the sad news had set off as fast as her legs could carry her, in order to be the first to communicate it, had a terrible effect on the nervous system of my poor friend Claribel. Forgetting her usual self-composure in her extreme anguish, she gave utterance to a shriek so piercing and doleful, that it seemed to shake the very house to its foundations, and sank back into the nearest chair in a swoon. The scream brought my father to the door to inquire what was the matter, while the good neighbour--for in spite of her mania for delivering bad news, she was still a woman at heart--bustled about to procure restoratives and to sprinkle water on my poor friend's face until she recovered. The news we had heard was only too true, for, sad to relate, poor John Archer, who up to that very morning had been the picture of robust health, suddenly fell the victim of a violent fever that carried him off within a few hours. The doctors were at a loss to account for the disease, as there was no fever at that time in the neighbourhood. It was an isolated case. During his delirium he was heard to give vent to certain incoherent ravings, frequently calling out, "The waxen image! the waxen image!" He was heard to couple the names of De Chevron and Madge Mandrake together, but the bystanders, his parents, understood nothing of his meaning.