‘It’s very hard upon me,’ she said to herself, thinking of the dreadful deed that had been done upstairs; ‘the rooms suit me, and I’m used to them; and yet I believe I shall have to go. I shall fancy the place is haunted.’ She glanced round over her shoulder, fearful lest she should see La Chicot in her awful beauty--a marble face, a blood-stained throat, and glassy eyes regarding her with sightless stare. ‘I shall have to leave,’ thought Mrs. Rawber. Meanwhile Mrs. Evitt was alone upstairs. She was a ghoul-like woman, for whom horrors were not without a ghastly relish. She liked to visit in the house of death, to sit beside the winter fire with a batch of gossips, consuming tea and toast, dwelling on the details of a last illness, or discussing the order of a funeral. She had a dreadful courage that came of familiarity with death. She took up the candle, and went in alone and unappalled to look at La Chicot. ‘How tight that hand is clenched!’ she said to herself; ‘I wonder whether there’s anything in it?’ She forced back the stiffening fingers, and with the candle held close, bent down to peer into the marble palm. In the hollow of that dead hand she found a little tuft of iron-grey hair, which looked as if it had been torn from a man’s head. Mrs. Evitt drew the hairs from the dead hand, and with a careful precision laid them in an old letter which she took from her pocket, and folded up the letter into a neat little packet, which she returned to the same calico receptacle for heterogeneous articles. ‘What a turn it has given me!’ she said to herself, stealing back to the landing, her petticoats lifted, lest the hem of her garments should touch that dreadful pool beside the bed. The expression of her face had altered since she entered the room. There was a new intelligence in her dull gray eyes. Her countenance and bearing were as of one whose mind is charged with the weight of an awful secret. The surgeon came, an elderly man, who lived close at hand, and was experienced in the ways of that doubtful section of society which inhabited the neighborhood of Cibber Street. In his opinion La Chicot had been dead three hours. It was now on the stroke of four. One o’clock must, therefore, have been the time of the murder. The police-sergeant came back in company with a man in plain clothes, and these two made a careful examination of the premises together, the result of which inspection went to show that it would have been extremely difficult for any one to enter the house from the back. The front door was left on the latch all night, and had been for the last eleven years, and no harm had ever come of it, Mrs. Evitt declared, plaintively. It was a Chubb lock, and she didn’t believe there was another like it in all London.