'How right he is!' she exclaimed, nodding to the flickering candle in her hand. 'There's a time for everything an' this is the time for makin' a peep-show of my pore darter's body. Oh, yes!'
I mounted a shaky staircase, the steps of which were, some of them, so broken away that the ascent was no easy matter. The miserable light from the woman's candle, as I entered the room, seemed suddenly to shoot up in a column of dazzling brilliance that caused me to close my eyes in pain, so unnaturally sensitive had they been rendered by the terrible expectance of the sight that was about to sear them.
When I re-opened my eyes, I perceived that in the room there was one window, which looked like a trap-door; on the red pantiles of the opposite roof lay a smoke-dimmed sheet of moonlight. On the floor at the further end of the garret, where the roof met the boards at a sharp angle, a mattress was spread. Then speech came to me.
'Not there!' I groaned, pointing to the hideous black-looking bed, and turning my head away in terror. The woman burst into a cackling laugh.
'Not there? Who said she was there? I didn't. If you can see anythink there besides a bed an' a quilt, you've got eyes as can make picturs out o' nothink, same as my darter's eyes could make 'em, pore dear.'
'Ah, what do you mean?' I cried, leaping to the side of the mattress, upon which I now saw that no dead form was lying.
For a moment a flash of joy as dazzling as a fork of lightning seemed to strike through my soul and turn my blood into a liquid fire that rose and blinded my eyes.
'Not dead,' I cried; 'no, no, no! The pitiful heavens would have rained blood and tears at such a monstrous tragedy. She is not dead—not dead after all! The hideous dream is passing.'
'Oh, ain't she dead, pore dear?—ain't she? She's dead enough for one,' said the woman; 'but 'ow can she be there on that mattress, when she's buried, an' the prayers read over her, like the darter of the most 'spectable mother as ever lived in Primrose Court! That's what the neighbours say o' me. The most 'spectable mother as ever—'
'Buried!' I said, 'who buried her?'