The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 107: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE DOOMED WOMAN 89 corpse of the broken-hearted mother, and the guilty daughter suddenly gave vent to a thrilling shriek of ineffable anguish, a shriek that rang through floor and ceiling, wall and roof, and pierced the brains of those who heard it. Then she staggered forward a few steps, reeled half-around, and fell heavily.” Here Mrs. Ranger paused again, and covering her face with her withered hands, she sobbed low, but with an inward convulsiveness that denoted a mortal anguish. She had narrated this second chapter in her own sad history, for it was her own tale she was telling, with a mournful evenness and painful continuity of tone, not seeming exactly to ad- dress herself to Loftus, nor to have the deliberate intent of unveiling to him the secrets of her earlier life, but rather giving audible expression to the train of recollections which circumstances had now so vividly conjured up. But he listened with the deepest, deepest interest, for it was a tale which no man could hear unmoved. The tears even trickled down his cheeks, and his heart swelled with emotion, for in imagination he saw every feature, every detail, every in- cident of the woman’s history as plainly as if it were being enacted upon a theatre, and he a spectator of the whole drama. ‘Years passed away,” continued Mrs. Ranger, resuming her audible musings after a deep silence of several minutes, “and during that period many were the vicissitudes which the guilty daughter had known. She had seen the remains of her mother, that mother whom her crime had murdered, deposited in the churchyard. She had seen the damp clay heaped up over the coffin. Some time afterward she had revisited the spot and had seen the grass growing upon the grave. But whenever, in the deep winter’s night, she lay awake and heard the winds moaning or sighing or raving without, she thought how cold, oh, how cold that poor mother must be slumbering in her grave. She thought how the rude blasts would howl, and sweep in fury, stern and pitiless, bleak and chill, over the greensward and amid the tombstones in that lone churchyard. It was to avoid such thoughts as these that she plunged headlong into dissipation. She became the mistress of one man, then the mistress of another; sometimes being heartlessly deserted or thrust off by him to whom she surrendered herself, at other times } (C(O) nn) GDoOOo So!