The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins — Read

The instant Sarah Leeson had turned the key of her bedroom door, she took the sheet of notepaper from its place of concealment in her bosom -- shuddering, when she drew it out, as if the mere contact of it hurt her -- placed it open on her little dressing-table, and fixed her eyes eagerly on the lines which the note contained. At first they swam and mingled together before her. She pressed her hands over her eyes, for a few minutes, and then looked at the writing again.

The characters were clear now -- vividly clear, and, as she fancied, unnaturally large and near to view. There was the address: "To my Husband"; there the first blotted line beneath, in her dead mistress's handwriting; there the lines that followed, traced by her own pen, with the signature at the end -- Mrs. Treverton's first, and then her own. The whole amounted to but very few sentences, written on one perishable fragment of paper, which the flame of a candle would have consumed in a moment. Yet there she sat, reading, reading, reading, over and over again; never touching the note, except when it was absolutely necessary to turn over the first page; never moving, never speaking, never raising her eyes from the paper. As a condemned prisoner might read his death-warrant, so did Sarah Leeson now read the few lines which she and her mistress had written together not half an hour since.