The Mysteries of the Court of London by Pauline Clarendon — page 246: what you’re looking at

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

A NIGHT OF TERRORS 243 of holiest devotion, that full tide of purest love! And how often it is, great heaven! that not only does one woman pine and die for such a heart, but that a hundred living, bursting female hearts are doomed to perish wretchedly, wretchedly, for the infamy of one man! But if Caroline Walters could no longer live for love, yet she might still live on for vengeance. A great change had come over the young girl during the twenty-four hours which she had now passed beneath the midwife’s roof. She no longer attempted to veil from her sight the misery of her position. Lost, betrayed, abandoned by him whom she had adored, the full measure of his deceit and treachery developed itself, in all its black details, to her appalled understanding. Then came jealousy, too, running like the bursting of a pent-up torrent through every avenue of her soul, and she felt assured that she had been deserted for some other fair one! Her Spanish blood boiled like a lava-stream in her veins; and a thirst for vengeance, acquiring all the intensity of a ferocious passion, penetrated like a consuming flame into the very depths of the young girl’s being. The dark nature of her thoughts scared her, as she thus sat ruminating in her lonely chamber. The ideas upon which her bewildered mind settled itself — ideas urging her Spanish nature to revenge — appeared to be a crime. But the longer she studied them, the more she dwelt upon them, the less startling did they become. And then arose new sources of terror in the influence which the raging wind- storm without and the plashing of the turbid waters below exercised upon her soul; and lastly came those thoughts of suicide, which convulsed her entire frame with ineffable horror. But, no — no: she must live for vengeance! Rising from her seat, and casting a hurried glance around the chamber, — which was small, but neatly furnished, though gloomy in its aspect, — she felt that she must do something to occupy her mind. She knew that she could not sleep even if she retired to her couch; and her utter loneliness, alike of position and of mind, began to have an influence over her which was intolerable. What if she were to seek an hour’s companionship with one of the four young females to whom she had been intro- duced, and with whom she had passed the greater portion COMIC OOO SS (GO)