The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 213: what you’re looking at

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

THE PRISONER 195 ghastliness from the fine white teeth. And her look too, oh, how profoundly sad it was! That countenance which had been wont to beam with sunny smiles, or to glow with the flush of sensuous passion, now seemed to be the tomb- stone of a perished heart, and on which was traced the epitaph of a happiness that was gone, never to come back. It was about noon when she was thus seated in her cham- ber on the occasion that we now propose specially to direct the reader’s attention thither. She was clad in the very plainest dress that she had brought with her from London at the time of her ill-fated journey; there was nothing co- quettish about her now, no studied air of seductiveness in her toilet any more than there was in her looks. She seemed an altered creature, but one of those beings whom it is nec- essary for the hand of Providence to drag, for its own wise purposes, through the most terrible ordeals, and whose hearts must pass through fiery furnaces in order that they may be chastened. Books were before her upon the table at which she sat, and they were books which she read now, but which only a few months back, when in the luxurious saloons at Madame Angelique’s house of gilded infamy, she would have tossed away from her with the light laugh of scorn. Yes, and bitterly, bitterly did Lettice Rodney repent of her misdeeds. She thought of the Duchess of Marchmont, to accomplish whose ruin she had lent herself, and the conviction was strong in her mind that her own calamity was to a certain extent a judgment upon her head for her wickedness then. But she knew that she had many, many other sins to answer for: for instance, her personation of Mrs. Rayner in order to rob the lawyer of his money, and then too the very object of the journey which she had undertaken at the time, — namely, to try and wean away Eveleen O’Brien from that parental home to which the reformed young woman had gone back. For all these mis- - deeds, either accomplished or meditated, — and for the life of voluntary pollution and depravity which she had led, — did Lettice Rodney believe herself most righteously punished now. And yet she was not altogether without the hope that her innocence would yet be made apparent, and entertaining this hope, her present contrition was all the more praise- worthy, for it would indeed have been comparatively little CONMIC OOO) SS (E) mM