The String of Pearls (1850), p. 453

event—she betook herself to the bedside of Tobias, there to await his awakening.
When he did open his eyes, they were clear and bright, and the fever had left his brow and cheeks. The first object his eye rested upon was Minna, and the first words he said were—
"Todd is dead!"
"Ah, then, Tobias, you have nothing now to fear, for you have not an enemy in the world."
"No," he cried, "I have now nothing to fear—but, my Minna, my own, my beautiful! how much I have to love! We shall be now, Minna, very, very happy, indeed, and God will bless me for your dear sake!"

CHAPTER CIII.
MR. LUPIN HAS A SINGULAR INTERVIEW WITH MRS. OAKLEY.

Amid all the exciting circumstances that it has been our duty to relate—amid the turmoil of events consequent upon the wild villany of Todd, and the urgent attempts of Mrs. Lovett to get her accounts audited—we have very much lost sight of Mrs. Oakley.
Perhaps the reader has not been altogether unwilling to lose sight of a lady who, we will admit, was not calculated to make great advances in his esteem. But yet one thing must be recollected, and that is that Mrs. Oakley is Johanna's mother! That we opine is a fact which she should be given some degree of attention for; and insomuch as the bright eyes of the fair and noble-minded Johanna might be dimmed by an additional tear if anything very serious was to become of Mrs, Oakley, we will go a little out of our way just now to see what that deluded parson-ridden woman is about.
The outgoings and the incomings of Mrs. Oakley for a long time past had been so various and discursive, that the poor spectacle-maker had long since left off considering that he had anything in the shape of a domestic establishment. Certainly, Johanna was always at hand, until lately, to attend to her father's comforts—but the wife never. There was either a prayer-meeting, or a love-feast, or some congregation or another assembled to hear or to see Mr. Lupin; so that if the wife and the mother went to such places to learn her duties, it was pretty evident that the lesson occupied the whole of
her time.
But still at times she did come home. At odd seasons she was to be
found groaning and snuffling at the fireside in the little dark parlour at the back of the shop; but now for some few days she had totally disappeared.
Mr. Oakley was alone.
Up a dingy court in the City, not a hundred miles from the dingy purlieus of Monkwell Street, there was a dingy conventicle, upon the front of which the word "Ebenezer" announced its character, or its would-be character. The
upper part of this chapel was converted into a dwelling-place, and there luxuriated Mr. Lupin.
The flock (geese, of course!) of the reverend gent rented the edifice, so that there he was rent free, and there he was in the habit of inviting to tea such of the females of his congregation who either had money of their own, or whose husband's had tills easily accessible, or pockets into which the wife's hand could be dipped at discretion: and dipped it generally was at in-discretion;—for folks, whether they be wives or not, when they can dip into other folks' pockets, do not always know how much to take just and no more.