noon Jasper came—came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong sinister look—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 Poddon Place—slunk into Arabella Crane's prim drawing-room, and said, sullenly: " All is up; here I am!"
Three days afterward, 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 apart- ment, 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 de- signed by Mr. Bentham's reformatory Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings toward Jasper Losely (and what those feelings were no virile pen can presume authorita- tively to define—for lived there ever a jnan who thoroughly— thoroughly understood a woman?), or whatever in earlier life might have been their reciprocated vows of eternal love, not only from the day that Jasper, on his return to his native shores, presented himself in Poddon Place, had their intimacy been re- stricted to the austerest bounds of friendship; but after Jasper had so rudely declined the hand which now fed him, Arabella Crane had probably perceived that her sole chance of retaining intellectual power over his lawless being, necessitated the utter relinquishment of every hope or project that could expose her again to his contempt. Suiting appearances to reality, the de- corum of a separate house was essential to the maintenance of that authority with which the rigid nature of their intercourse invested her. The additional cost strained her pecuniary re- sources, but she saved in her own accommodation in order to leave Jasper no cause to complain of any stinting in his. There, then, she sat by the window, herself unseen, eyeing him in his opposite solitude, accepting for her own life a barren sacrifice, but a jealous sentinel on his. Meditating as she sat, and as she eyed him—meditating what employment she could invent, with the bribe of emoluments to be paid furtively by her—for those strong hands that could have felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny—and for that restless mind, hun- gering for occupation, with the digestion of an ostrich for dice
