The fire was still burning in the parlour grate. Todd raked the glowing embers together with the iron bar, and then he took a good draught at the brandy. It revived him most wonderfully, and he gave one of his old chuckles, as he muttered—
"Oh, that I could get a few whom I could name in such a position as I had yon man in in the cellar a short time since. That would be well, indeed. Ha! I am, after all, rather lucky, though."
A sharp knock come, at this moment, at the outer door of the shop, and Todd sprang in alarm to his feet.
CHAPTER CXLIX.
TODD IS IN GREAT PERIL IN THE EARLY MORNING IN LONDON.
The silence that ensued after that knock at his door, for he had become to consider it as his again, was like the silence of the grave. The only sound that Todd heard then, was the painful beating of his own heart.
The guilty man was full of the most awful apprehensions.
"What is it?" he said. "Who is it?—who can it be? Surely, no one for me. There is no one who saw me. No—no! It cannot be. It is some accidental sound only. I—begin—to doubt if it were a knock at all.—Oh, no, it was no knock."
Bang! came the knock again.
Todd actually started and uttered a cry of terror, and then he crouched down and crept towards the door. He might, to be sure, have made his escape from the premises, with some little trouble, by the way he had got into them; but he was most anxious to find out who it was that demanded admittance to the old shop in Fleet Street, with all its bad associations and character of terror; so he crept towards the door, and just as he reached it, the knock came again.
If the whole of his future hopes—we allude to the future that might be for him in this world only, for Todd had no hopes nor thoughts of another—had depended upon his preserving silence and stillness, he could not have done so, and he gave another start.