He's very dissipated, they say, and may be in any one of the joints in the lower part of the town." I stopped in dismay, clutching wildly at the railing of the stairs we were descending.

I had hardly heard the latter words, all my mind was on what he had said first.
"Miss Carmel Cumberland ill ?" I stammered, "too ill to be told ?" I was sufficiently master of myself to put it this way.
"Yes," he rejoined, kindly, as he urged me down the very stairs I had seen her descend in such a state of mind a few hours before.

"A servant who had been out late, heard the fall of some heavy body as she was passing Miss Cumberland's rooms, and rushing in found Miss Carmel, as she called her, lying on the floor near the open fire.

Her face had struck the bars of the grate in falling, and she was badly burned.

But that was not all; she was delirious with fever, brought on, they think, by anxiety about her sister, whose name she was constantly repeating.