find it blocked with dismayed people, pale,
excited, and in a whispering fermentation round a
doorway crowded with constables, Templars, and
porters. Gehagan, seeing a person they knew,
asks him what is the matter? He tells them old
Mrs. Duncomb and her two servants have been
murdered. Gehagan instantly says to Kerrel:

"This Mrs. Duncomb was your Sarah's
acquaintance." They then go to a coffee-house in
Covent Garden, where, amidst ordinary current
talk about Macklin and Quin, a gentleman alludes
to the murder, and says he should certainly
suspect some laundress who must have known
the chambers, and how to get in and out. At
eight o'clock, the two Templars go to the
Horse Shoe and Magpie, in Essex-street, and
stay there carousing till one o'clock in the
morning, forgetting the horror of the recent event
over a considerable quantity of wine. They
then return to the Temple. To their surprise
and almost alarm, they find Kerrel's door open,
a fire burning in the room, and a candle on the
table. By the fire, at this strange hour, stands
the young woman with the stern face and the
pale pinched lips; she has a blue riding-hood on.
It is Sarah Malcolm again.

Kerrel says to her: "Sarah, this Mrs. Duncomb
was one of your acquaintance; have you
heard of anybody being taken up for the murder?"

Sarah replied: "One Mr. Knight, who had
chambers under her, has been absent two or
three days, and he is suspected."

Mr. Kerrel frowns as he says: "Nobody that
was acquainted with Mrs. Duncomb shall be
here till the murderer is found out, therefore
lock up your things and get away."

His suspicions have been aroused by finding
her there at that hour, and he asks Gehagan to go
down and call up the watch. Gehagan runs down,
but there being a double door to the Alienation
Office, he cannot get the doors open, and goes up
and tells Kerrel so, who goes down and brings
back with him two watchmen. Sarah Malcolm is
in the bedroom turning over in the drawers some
linen, which she says is her own. Kerrel goes
into his closet suspiciously, and finds some
waistcoats gone from a portmanteau, and asks
Sarah where they are? She asks to speak a
word with him in private; but he says:

"No, I have no business with you that need
be made a secret of."

She then owns she has pawned the waistcoats
for two guineas, with Mr. Williams, of Drury-
lane, and begs him not to be angry. Kerrel
says, "Why did you not ask me for money?"
He says he could freely forgive her for
pawning the waistcoats; but he suspects she
was concerned in the murder, because he
had heard her talk of Mrs. Lydia Duncomb.
A pair of earrings in the middle drawer Sarah
Malcolm owns, and put in her bosom. Kerrel then
kicks a suspicious bundle which he sees in the
closet, and asks what that is? Sarah says it
is dirty linen, which she does not wish seen,
wrapped up in an old gown. Kerrel, searching
further, and missing other things, says to the
watch:

"Watch, take care of her, and do not let
her go."

When she is led down, Kerrel, now alarmed,
looks under his bed and sees another bundle.
In another place, some blood-stained linen and
a silver pint tankard with dry blood upon the
handle, are concealed.

The two friends then go down, call "Watch!"
loudly, and ask where the woman is? It is a
boisterous night; the angry howling wind tears
through the Temple archways, and screeches
round corners as if running for its life.

The two watchmen, Hughes and Mastreter,
sluggish old men in cumbrous belted great-coats,
shuffle up with their staves and lanterns to
Tanfield-court, and tell the excited man that
they have let the woman go, as nothing has been
found on her, and she had not been charged
before a constable. She had gone out of the
court, and then returned, saying it was late,
that she lived in Shoreditch, and therefore
she had rather sit up all night in the watch-
house than go home. "No," said one of the
men, "you shall not sit up in the watch-house;
therefore go about your business, and be here
again at ten o'clock. She promised to come,
and then went away.

"You dogs!" said Kerrel. "Go and find
her again, or I'll send you to Newgate."

The men went, and found her sitting between
two watchmen at the Temple-gate. To get her
along the more easily, Hughes told her that Mr.
Kerrel wanted to speak to her, and that he was
not so angry as he had been.

The two watchmen and Sarah Malcolm
meet the two friends carrying the tankard and
the linen, which they hold to the lantern-light.
Gehagan is furious, and flies into a storm of
accusation.

Then he shows her the tankard, and she rubs
at the handle with her apron.

"No," shouts Gehagan, "you shan't wipe it
off!"

Sarah Malcolm says:

"It is my tankard. I have had it five years;
my mother gave it me, and I took the waistcoats
to raise thirty shillings to get it out of pawn.
I pricked my finger, that was how the blood
came."

They drag the miserable woman into the
watchman's box; the two bundles of linen
lie there where the two friends had thrown
them. The watchmen find in the woman's
bosom a green silk purse containing twenty-
one guineas. Sarah Malcolm says she found the
purse in the street, and it looks clean because
she has since washed it. The linen in the
bundle is stained with blood. The tankard,
marked "O. D.," was Mrs. Duncomb's tankard,
and at once identified. The green purse
Mrs. Rhymer would not swear to. A friend of
Mrs. Duncomb's recognised the linen found in
Mr. Kerrel's drawer as darned in Mrs.
Duncomb's manner. It had been stored in the
strong box with the money and tankard.

Young as she was, Sarah Malcolm had
already a damaged reputation, for her