"They are
saying--what are they saying? Let them be saying!"
Then a dreadful thing happened. A body was found in the river,--the dead
body of a young woman very fair and slight and tall. Every one thought
that it was my body.
I had gone away without a word. No one knew where I was. My own father
identified the corpse, and Floss and Marion, at their boarding-school,
were put into mourning. Then mother went. She kept her head under the
shock of the likeness, and bethought her of "a strawberry mark upon my
left arm." (_Really_ I had one over my left knee.) That settled it, for
there was no such mark to be found upon the poor corpse. It was just at
this moment that the news came to me in my country retreat that I had
been found dead, and I flew up to London to give ocular proof to my poor
distracted parents that I was alive. Mother, who had been the only one
not to identify the drowned girl, confessed to me that she was so like
me that just for a second she, too, was deceived. You see, they knew I
had not been very happy since my return to the stage, and when I went
away without a word, they were terribly anxious, and prepared to believe
the first bad tidings that came to hand. It came in the shape of that
most extraordinary likeness between me and that poor soul who threw
herself into the river.
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