The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 63: what you’re looking at

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

44 REYNOLDS’ WORKS overpowering. A single glance at the interior of that letter would clear up all doubt, relieve her of all suspense; and she knows, she feels, she has the conviction that it will do so, but there is within her a shuddering awful horror to arrive at that certainty. Thoughts so wild, apparently so impossible, are agitating in her brain; and yet what she thinks of is possible, for the proof is there; she holds it in her hand. There is within-her the certainty that it is so; and yet she flutters and trembles and quivers with all the doubt of agonizing suspense. This state is intolerable. She opens the letter, she reads, but only a few words and for a few moments; and she sinks down upon her knees with a low, deep, long-drawn, gasping moan, the full meaning of which it would be almost impossible to describe. Her head is bowed upon the chair from which she has sunk down, her face is buried in her hands, and that boudoir is silent as the grave; not even the pulsations of her heart nor the respirations of her breath are audible. She is motionless as the sculptured effigy of Despair kneeling by a monument of a loved and lost one. Yet it is not that she is in a state of unconsciousness. No, her sense remains, but experienced only as a stunned, dismayed consternation. There is some- thing awful, something profoundly solemn, in the mental condition of that kneeling lady. She weeps not, her bosom is not convulsed; there is not a tremor thrilling through her form, not even the slightest creeping agitation to give sign of life. Yet she lives, but hers are unutterable, ineffable feelings. Minutes elapse while she thus remains kneeling by the chair, her face buried in her hands. At length slowly, oh, so slowly, she rises up like a ghost ascending from the tomb, and as a ghost she is marble pale. If she caught the reflec- tion of her own image in the mirror opposite, she would start in dismay; she would not believe, in the first shock, that it was herself she beheld imaged there. But she has no out- ward vision for anything; her eyes behold nothing in the room. All her thoughts, all her senses, all her faculties, are absorbed in one idea which lies at the bottom of her soul. Again several minutes elapse, and then with a slow, mechanical movement, as if unconscious of the very impulse which she is obeying, Eliza stoops down and picks up the letter which. has fallen from her hand, — that letter which Gomichbooks (E(0)