The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 333: what you’re looking at

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

THE MURDERESS 303 The rope was woven, — woven by her subtle fingers in the midst of the dense impenetrable darkness; and then she bethought herself of the bars that defended the window of the dungeon, and likewise of the stool against which she had stumbled a few minutes back. All the means of death were thus at her disposal, within her reach, fearfully available, and she hesitated not, no, not even for an instant. On the contrary, her proceedings were as quick and her movements as rapid as if there were no darkness to impede her. It appeared to her as if she could see her way easily, as she felt it through the pitchy darkness in which she was entombed. - But then her mind had a horrible clearness with regard to all the details of that suicidal process; for she was resolved to cheat the hangman, the gallows, and the multitudes that throng to the spectacle of death, as the carrion crows gather around a corpse. Great, then, was the precision with which the determined desperate woman tied a running knot in the cord which she had woven; and it was even with a feeling of triumph — dreadful, savage, ferocious triumph — that she flung the noose over her head. Then mounting upon the stool, she fastened the other end to the bars of the window; and now — And now, all her suicidal preparations being complete, and the impenetrable, immeasurable abysm of eternity already opening before her mental vision, she stopped short, for a sudden consternation overwhelmed her. Still standing upon the stool, with the cord of twisted tapes around her neck, the miserable woman was struck with dismay as she now looked death face to face. Hell seemed to be opening at her feet; beyond the more than Egyptian darkness which prevailed in her dungeon, the lurid fires of Satan’s kingdom appeared to burn. But at the moment when, thus stricken with dismay and overpowered by dread horrot; the murderess was experienc- ing a revulsion of feeling which would inevitably have ended. in the abandonment of her suicidal project, — at the mo- ment, we say, when her thoughts reached that turning-point and her ideas arrived at that juncture at which she was on the point of flinging off the noose and leaping down from the stool, — at this moment was it that the clock of St. Sepulchre’s proclaimed the hour of one. COU OVC) <S m