Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 170: what you’re looking at

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

é LADY BESS’S HISTORY 153 All the next day I roved through the streets of London, . half-mad with the torturing sense of my wretched position. Night came again, and I was still houseless, foodless, pen- niless. I had not eaten a morsel for many, many long hours, but yet I was not faint, I was desperate. A strange excite- ment was raging within me, and often and often did I catch myself dwelling upon Kate Marshall’s words, when in a laughine, bantering mood she had told me that she hali- believed I really had taken Mrs. Knight’s jewels, and that she should not think any the worse of me if I really had. Ah! why did the reminiscence of those words thus keep coming back to my mind? Was it that an evil spirit had been created at the time they were uttered, to lie in wait for me, haunt my footsteps unseen, mark when the moment of weakness and despair arrived, and then whisper these words anew in my ear? Certain it is that what was at first a mere reminiscence became an inspiration, and that what became an inspiration grew into a resolution. Yes, a reso- lution engendered by despair, and desperately taken. I felt that I hovered between two distinct chasms, — one yawning on my right hand, one upon my left. I must either plunge into that abyss in which woman’s honour is engulfed, or I must throw myself headlong into the other where honesty ‘is swallowed up. There I stood, already a lost being, though no deed of crime was done as yet, but still a lost being, be- cause a fatal and irresistible necessity was impelling me on- _ ward to precipitate myself headlong into one of those gulfs. ‘““ Under this influence I hurried through the metropolis, and gained the outskirts on the northern side, because they were those in which my recent searches after the road to the unknown village had been directed, and therefore had made me familar with that neighbourhood. It was in a lonely part, where there were but six or seven houses scattered about, that my first crime was committed. Two ladies, apparently mother and daughter, came forth from one of those houses, pausing upon the threshold to bid good night to a lady, evidently the mistress of that house, where they had no doubt been passing the evening. I heard the mistress of the house ask if she should send a servant to accompany them home; they laughed as they declined, saying that as their own abode was but a hundred yards distant, they did not fear any danger for so short a walk. Yet it was in that Gomicdoo cS (EO)