Tobias at once sprang up to a sitting posture in the bed, and cried—
"No, no! Is it really so?"
"Yes," added the colonel. "Sweeney Todd is dead."
For a moment or two Tobias looked from the colonel to the surgeon, and from the surgeon to the colonel, with a bewildered expression of countenance, and then burst into tears.
"That will do," said the surgeon.
"It has succeeded?" whispered the colonel.
"Fully. It could not do better. He will recover full consciousness now when those tears are over. All will go well with him; but do not, by word or look, insinuate the remotest doubt of the truth of what you have told him. It would be better to say the same thing to any of the servants that may come about him."
"I will—I will; and particularly to his master, whom I would as soon trust with a secret as I would with the command of a regiment of cavalry."
Tobias wept for the space of about ten minutes, and then he looked up with a face in which there was a totally different expression to what it had borne but a short time previously, and with a faltering voice he spoke—
"And so Todd is gone at last?"