The String of Pearls (1850), p. 670

"Oh, it's all right," said Todd. "It's all right. I will sleep again—I must sleep again; for it yet wants hours and hours to the night, when I may, at least, make the attempt to get off from—from England for ever!"
A faint sort of doze—it could not be called a sleep—was coming over Todd, when he suddenly heard the sound of voices; and he was startled wide awake by hearing his own name pronounced. Yes, he clearly heard some one say—
"Todd!"
In a moment he sat up in bed, and intently listened. He held his breath, and he shook again, as his imagination began to picture to him a thousand dangers.
There were footsteps upon the staircase, and in a few moments he heard persons go into the next room—that is to say, the front one to that in which he lay, the room that he had paid for a few weeks' occupation of, and which was only divided from that in which he lay by a pair of folding-doors, that he knew were just upon the latch, and might, at any moment, be opened to discover him.
He then heard a female voice say—
"I do wish you would be quiet, Mr. Ben."
"Ah," said another voice, "keep him in order, Julia, for he has been quite raving about your beauty as we came along the street, I can tell you. Do you think the servant will be able to find your father?"
"Oh yes, Sir Richard. If ma were at home she could have said at once where he was; but Martha will find him, I dare say."
Todd threw the bed-clothes right over his head. It was no other than Sir Richard Blunt who was in the front-room of that diabolical lodging-house, and Todd looked upon himself as all but in custody. His sense of hearing seemed to be preternaturally acute, and although the bed-clothes covered up his ears, and he could not be said to be exactly in his usual state, inasmuch as terror had half deprived him of his reasoning powers, yet he heard plainly, and with what might be called a perfect distinctness, every word that was spoken in the front room.
Perhaps, even in the condemned cell of Newgate, Todd did not suffer such terrors as he was now assailed with in that lodging, where he thought he was so safe, and which he had, as he fancied, managed so cleverly.
"Will you be quiet, Ben!" said the girl's voice again.
"Make him—make him, Julia," said Sir Richard.
"Lor bless your little bits of eyes," said Ben. "Do now come and sit in my lap, and I'll tell you such a lively story of how the leopard we have got at the Tower lost a bit off the end of his tail?"
"I don't want to hear it."
"You don't want to hear it ? Come—come, my lambkin of a Julia—when shall we be married? Oh, do name the day your Ben will be done for for life. I want it over."
"Well, I'm sure," said Julia, "if you think you will be done for, you had better not think of it any more, Mr. Benjamin."
"It won't bear thinking of, my dear. It's like a cold bath in January: you had better shut yer eyes and tumble in."
"Upon my word, Ben," said Sir Richard, laughing, "you are anything but gallant; and if I were Julia, I would not have you."
"Not have me? Lord, yes, she'll have me. Only look at me."
"Ah," said Julia, "you think, because you are a great monster of a fellow, that anybody would have you; but I can tell you that a husband half your size would be just as well, and I only wonder, after you have made all the neighbours laugh at me, that I have a word to say to such a mountain of a man, that I do, you wretch!"
"Laugh!" cried Ben. "Why, my duck, what do they laugh at? I should like to catch them laughing."
"Why, you know, you wretch, that that day it rained as if cats and dogs were coming down, you took me up as if I had been a baby, you did, and carried me home, and me with a jug of porter in my right hand, and the change out of a