The String of Pearls (1850), p. 310

Todd carefully locked the parlour door.
"Charley. How do you like your place?"
"Very well, sir; and I think in a little time I shall like it better."
"Good lad! Good lad! Well, well. Perhaps I ought not to say too much so soon, but if you merit my esteem, Charley, I shall do as much for you as I did for the last lad I had. After some term of service with me, I provided him with an independant home. A large house, and a garden. Ha!"
"How very kind."
"Yes. Very."
"And is he happy ?"
"Quite, in a manner of speaking, notwithstanding human nature is prone to be discontented, and there are persons, who would sigh, if in Paradise, for some
change, even if it were to a region supposed to be its opposite zone. Charley, however, I think will be of a different mind; and when your time comes—which it certainly will—Ha!—to reap the fruits of your service with me, I am sure that no one will hear you complain."
"I will not be ungrateful sir."
"Well, well, we shall see; and now while I am gone let there be no peeping or prying about. No attempts to open doors or force locks. No scrambling
to look upon shelves or raking in odd corners. If you do—I—Ha! ha! I will cut your throat, Charley, with the bluntest razor I have."
Todd had got on his gloves by this time, and then he left the shop. Johanna was alone! Yes, there she was, at last, alone in that dreadful place, which now
for days upon days had been food for her young imagination. There she was in that place, which her waking thoughts and her dreams had alike peopled with
horrors. There she was between those walls, which had perchance echoed to the last despairing death cry of him whom she had loved better than life itself.
There she was in the very atmosphere of murders. His blood might form part of the stains that were upon the dingy walls and the begrimed floor. Oh, if
was horrible!
"God help me now! God help me now!" said Johanna, as she covered her face with her hands and wept convulsively.
She heard a faint sound. It was the chiming of St. Dunstan's clock, and she started. It put her in mind that time, her great ally, now was fleeting.
"Away tears!" she cried as she dashed the heavy moisture from her long eye-lashes. "Away tears, I have been strong in purpose. I have already waded through a sea of horrors, and I must be firm now. The time has come. The time that I looked forward to when I thus attired myself, and thought it possible to deceive this dreadful man. Courage! Courage! I have now much to do."
First she crept to the door and looked out into the street. A vague suspicion that Todd, after all, might only be watching near at hand, somewhere, took possession of her. She looked long and anxiously to the right and to the left, but she saw nothing of him. Then she fastened the door upon the inside.
"If he should return very suddenly," she said, "I shall have notice of it by his efforts to open the door. That will give me a moment for preparation possibly."
Then with such an anxious look as no language could do justice to in its delineation, Johanna looked round the shop. Where was she to begin her
investigation? There were drawers, cupboards, chests, shelves. What was she to look at first? or was she in dread of some contrivances of Todd's to find
out that she had looked at all, yet at this the last moment, forego the risk and rush into the street and so home?
"No, no! I am in God's hands," she said, <f and I will not flinch."
And yet, although she felt that she was quite alone in that place, how cautiously she trod. How gently she touched one thing and then another, and with what a shudder she laid her hand for a moment to steady herself, upon the arm of the shaving chair. By so leaning upon it she found that it was a