not yourself, Bridget. I have been saving and saving and saving for dreary years,—nothing else to interest me, and I am richer than I seem."
"But where are you going, miss?" said Bridget, slowly recovering from the stupefaction occasioned by her mistress's announcement.
"I don't know; I don't care."
"Oh, gracious stars! is it with that dreadful Jasper Losely?—it is, it is. You are crazed, you are bewitched, miss!"
"Possibly I am crazed,—possibly bewitched; but I take that man's life to mine as a penance for all the evil mine has ever known; and a day or two since I should have said, with rage and shame, 'I cannot help it; I loathe myself that I can care what becomes of him.' Now, without rage, without shame, I say, 'The man whom I once so loved shall not die on a gibbet if I can help it' and, please Heaven, help it I will."
The grim woman folded her arms on her breast, and raising her head to its full height, there was in her face and air a stern gloomy grandeur, which could not have been seen without a mixed sensation of compassion and awe.
"Go now, Bridget; I have said all. He will be here soon: he will come; he must come; he has no choice; and then—and then—" she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and shivered.
Arabella Crane was, as usual, right in her predictions. Before noon Jasper came,—came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong sinister look—of the man whom the world cuts—triumphantly restored to its former place in his visage. Madame Caumartin had been arrested; Poole had gone into the country with Uncle Sam; Jasper had seen a police-officer at the door of his own lodgings. He slunk away from the fashionable thoroughfares, slunk to the recesses of Podden Place, slunk into Arabella Crane's prim drawing-room, and said sullenly, "All is up; here I am!"
Three days afterwards, in a quiet street in a quiet town of Belgium,—wherein a sharper, striving to live by his profession, would soon become a skeleton,—in a commodious airy apartment, looking upon a magnificent street, the reverse of noisy, Jasper Losely sat secure, innocuous, and profoundly miserable. In another house, the windows of which—facing those of Jasper's sitting-room, from an upper story-commanded so good a view therein that it placed him under a surveillance akin to that designed by Mr. Bentham's reformatory Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings towards
