The String of Pearls (1850), p. 435

to her, only he kept very close to it while she turned it round and round and looked at it. It might have been Mark Ingestrie's. It looked something like the sort of garment that a master mariner might be supposed to wear, and the evident recognition of it by the dog spoke wonders in favour of the supposition that it had belonged to his master at one time or another.
Johanna thought that in one of the pockets there seemed something, and upon putting in her hand she found a small piece of paper folded in four. To undo it was the work of a moment, and then she saw upon it the following words:—
"Mr. Oakley, Spectacle-maker, 33, Fore Street, City."
Her senses seemed upon the point of deserting her. Every object for a moment appeared to whirl round her in a mad dance. Who should know better—ah, who should know half so well as she—the handwriting which conveyed those few words to her senses ? It was the handwriting of her lost lover, Mark Ingestrie!
"Hilloa! Pison, is you here?" cried a voice at the shop door at this moment.
Johanna started to her feet.
"Who are you?—what do you want?" she cried. "Murder!—murder! He has been foully murdered, I say; I will swear it—I—I—God help me!"
With the little scrap of paper in her hand, she staggered back until she came to the huge shaving- chair, into which she sank with a long-drawn sigh.
"Why, what's the row?" said the man, who was no other than Hector's friend, the ostler, from the inn opposite. "What's the row? Now what an
out-and-out willain of a dog you is, Pison, to cut over here like bricks as soon as you can git loose to do so. Don't you know that old Todd is a busting to do you an ill turn some o' these days? and yet you will come, you hidiot."
"Mr. Todd is out," said Johanna.
"Oh, is he, my little man? Well, the devil go with him, that's all I say. Come along, that s a good dog."
Pison only wagged his tail in recognition of the friendly feeling between him and the ostler and then he kept quite close to Johanna and the waistcoat, which the moment he saw her drop, he laid hold of, and held tight with such an expression as was quite enough to convince the ostler he would not readily give it
up again.
"Now what a hanimal vou is," cried the ostler. "Whose blessed veskut is that you as got?"
"He found it here," said Johanna. "Did you see his master on the day when he came here?"
"No, my little chap, I didn't; but I don't care who knows it—it's my 'pinion that whosomedever his master was, old Sweeney Todd, your master,
knows more on him than most folks. Come away, Pison, will you?"
The dog did not now show much disinclination to follow the ostler, but he kept the waistcoat firmly in his grasp, as he left the shop after him. Johanna still held that little scrap of paper in her hand, and oh! what a world of food for reflection did it present her with. Was it, or was it not, an establishment of the fact of Mark Ingestrie having been Todd's victim? That was the question that Johanna put to herself, as through her tears, that fell like rain, she gazed upon that paper, with those few words upon it, in the well-known hand of her lover.
The more Johanna reflected upon this question, the more difficult a one did she find it to answer in any way that was at all satisfactory to her feelings. The strong presumption that Mark Ingestrie had fallen a victim to Todd had not been sufficiently obliterated by all that Sir Richard Blunt had said to her to free her
mind from a strong bias to fancy anything that transpired at Todd's a corroboration of that fact.
"Yes," she said, mournfully, "yes, poor—poor Mark. Each day only adds