The String of Pearls (1850), p. 374

all was quiet. This was a critical situation for Todd. If any one, who was a painter of pictures or of morals had but seen him, Sweeney Todd, as he there stood, they would no longer have doubted either that there was a devil, or that some persons in this world, were actuated by a devilish fiend. He looked the incarnate fiend!—the Mephistopholes of the imagination, such as he is painted by the German enthusiast. His laugh too? Was not that satanic? He set himself to listen to the voices that he heard in that quiet rooms and the sounds, holy and full of affection as they were, awakened no chord of answering feeling, in that bold, bad man's breast, lie stood apart from human nature, a solitary being. A wreck upon the ocean of society

"None loving, and by none beloved."

Who would be Sweeney Todd, for all the wealth, real or fabled, of a million Californias?
"He is here," he said, "I know his voice. Tobias is here. Ah! he mentions the name of God. Ha! He is more fitting to go to that heaven he can talk of so gibly, but there is none. There is none! No, no! all that is a fable."
Of course Todd could not believe in a divinity of goodness and mercy. If he had what on earth could have saved him from absolute madness?

CHAPTER LXXXIII.
TODD'S WONDERFUL ESCAPE.

"And so you do love me, Minna?" said Tobias.
How his voice shook like a reed swayed by the wind and yet what a world of melody was in it.
"Can you ask me to say yes?" was the reply of the fair young creature by his side. "Can you ask me to say yes, Tobias?"
"It seems to me," said Tobias, "as though it would be such a joy to hear you say so, Minna, and yet I will might ask you."
"How well you have got, Tobias. Your cheek has got its old colour back again, The colour it had once before you knew there was such a man as Sweeney Todd in the world. Your eyes are bright too, and your voice has its old pleasant sound."
"Used it to he pleasant to you, Minna?"
She held up her hand, and shook her head laughingly.
"No questions, Tobias! No questions. I will confess nothing."
"Stop!" said Tobias, as he put himself into an attitude of listening, "what was that, I thought I heard something? it was like a suppressed growl. I wish the colonel would come home. Did you not hear it, Minna?"
Minna had heard it, but she did not say she had.
"Where did it come from, Tobias?"
"From the stair-head, Minna."
"Oh, it is some accidental noise, such as is common to all houses, and such as always defy conjecture and explanation, and being nothing and meaning nothing, always comes to nothing. Yet I will go and see. Perhaps a door has been left open, and is banging to and fro by the wind, and if so it will only vex you to hear it again, Tobias."
It was Todd, who upon hearing the soft and tender speeches from the young lovers, had not been able to suppress a growl, and now that he had heard Minna Grey talk of coming to look what it was, he felt the necessity of instantly concealing himself somewhere.
It was not likely she should come down the stairs, so Todd adopted an original mode of keeping himself out of sight.
He descended steps sufficient, that by laying at full length along them, his