The String of Pearls (1850), p. 543

innocent and happy once; and the thought that such had been her blessed state, compared to what it was now, was enough to drive her mad—quite mad.
When she withdrew her hands from before her eyes she uttered a cry of terror. Memory had conjured up the forms of departed spirits to her; and now so strong
had become the impression upon her mind in that hour of agony, that she thought she saw them in her cell.
"Oh, mercy—mercy!" she said. "Why should I be tortured thus? Why should I suffer such horrors? Why do you glare at me with such fiery eyes for, horrible spectres?"
She covered up her eyes again; but then a still more terrible supposition took possession of her, for instead of fancying that the spectres were in the darkness of the cell at some distance from her, she thought that they all came crowding up to within an inch of her face, gibing and mocking.
"Off—off!" she cried, as she suddenly stretched out her arm. "Do not drive me quite mad."
Her eyes glared in the darkness like those of some wild animal. They looked phosphorescent, and for some time such was the agony and the thraldom o f her feelings, that she quite forgot she had the means of death in her hands.
She began to question the spirits that fancy presented in the darkness as thronging her cell.
"Who are you?" she said. "I know you not. I did not kill you! Why do you glare at me? And you, with your face matted with blood, I did not kill you. Who are you, too, with those mangled limbs? I killed none of you. Go to Sweeney Todd—go to Sweeney Todd!"
She kept her hands stretched out before her, and she fancied that it was only by such an action that she kept them from touching her very face. Then she dropped upon her knees, and in the same wild half-screaming voice she spoke again, crying—
"Away with you all! Todd it was that killed you—not I. He would have killed me, too. Do you hear, that he tried to kill me? but he could not. What boy are you? Oh, I know you now. He sent you to the madhouse. You are George Allan. Well, I did not kill you. I see that there is blood upon you! But why do you all come to me and leave Todd's cell tenantless, except by himself? for you cannot be here and there both! Away, I say! Away to him! Do not come here to torture me!"
Tap—tap—tap came a sound on the door of the cell.
"Hush!" she said. "Hush!"
"What's the matter?" said the turnkey.
"Nothing—nothing."
"But I heard you calling out about something."
"It is nothing, my friend. All is right. I was only—only praying."
"Humph!" said the turnkey. "If you were, it is something rather new, I reckon. She can't do any mischief, that's one comfort; and many of the worst ones as comes here don't pass very nice, cosy, comfortable nights. They fancies they sees all sorts of things, they does. Poor devils! I never seed nothing worse than myself or my wife in all my time, and I don't think I ever shall."
Mrs. Lovett did not now utter one word until she was sure the turnkey was out of hearing. That slight interruption had recalled her to herself, and done much to banish from her disturbed imagination all those fancied monsters of the brain which had disturbed her.
"Why did I yield even for a moment," she said, "to such a load of superstition? I thought that even at such a moment as this I should be free from such terrors. How I should have smiled in derision of any one else who had been weak enough to give way to them—and yet how real they looked. How very unlike the mere creations of a disturbed brain. Could they be real? Is it possible?"
Mrs. Lovett shook a little as she asked herself these questions, and it was only at such a moment that she could or was at all likely to ask them, for our