The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 148: what you’re looking at

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

126 THE COURT OF LONDON How have I offended you? What have I done to deserve this coldness, this ingratitude, this contempt? ” “What have you done, madam, to deserve any better feelings on my part?’ demanded the young girl, now fixing her large black eyes upon the milliner’s countenance as if her fiery looks could pierce that lady through and through. “Oh, madam,” continued Miss Walters, in a tone thrillingly wild and bitterly reproachful, “‘ I have learned to view things in a very different light from that in which I formerly beheld them. I now know who it was that literally sold me to the seducer, the base seducer, the nobly born villain who wooed me with guile, won my honour with treachery, and dis- carded me with a corresponding heartlessness. Yes, madam, I can see through it all, all; and I curse, ay, curse my own folly when I think that there was a time at which I believed that he really loved me. Well, what am I living for, I, who am so thoroughly unhappy, so irremediably miserable? Hope is gone, love is dead, every kind feeling is withered in my bosom; but another flame burns there, in the place of those lost sentiments, — a flame as terrible as if it were a tongue of fire snatched from the raging furnaces of hell.”’ “ Almighty God! talk not in this horrible manner,’ cried Mrs. Brace, clasping her hands and growing pale with a real and unfeigned terror. ‘Hush! I command you to be silent; the walls have ears,” exclaimed Mrs. Lindley, gesticulating fiercely at Caroline Walters. ‘I implore, I beseech you to tranquillize yourself, my dear child,’’ she added, in a more soothing tone. ‘‘ You said you were a prisoner here, but I hope that you will withdraw that averment. Come, my dear love,” she said, more coaxingly still, “‘ do me the justice to admit — ”’ ‘I will do myself and you the justice to tell the truth,” interrupted the young girl, in a cold, stern, and implacable voice. ‘ That the doors have not been barred against me, I acknowledge; that I might have quitted your dwelling at any moment, Mrs. Lindley, I frankly confess. But though no actual violence has been perpetrated against my liberty, yet am I retained captive by a moral thraldom equally effective and not the less heartless. For the apparel in which I could alone go forth has been hidden, and the little money I possessed has been taken away. Penniless, and without bonnet or cloak, I could not cross the threshold of your Gonmiicboolkss