he reference which
secured to Waife the asylum in which we last beheld him. In a few stern
sentences she had acquainted Waife with her fearless inflexible resolve
to associate her fate henceforth with the life of his lawless son; and,
by rendering abortive all his evil projects of plunder, to compel him
at last to depend upon her for an existence neither unsafe nor sordid,
provided only that it were not dishonest. The moment that she revealed
that design, Waife's trust in her was won. His own heart enabled him to
comprehend the effect produced upon a character otherwise unamiable and
rugged, by the grandeur of self-immolation and the absorption of one
devoted heroic thought. In the strength and bitterness of passion which
thus pledged her existence to redeem another's, he obtained the key to
her vehement and jealous nature; saw why she had been so cruel to the
child of a rival; why she had conceived compassion for that child in
proportion as the father's unnatural indifference had quenched the anger
of her own self-love; and, above all, why, as the idea of reclaiming and
appropriating solely to herself the man who, for good or for evil, had
grown into the all-predominant object of her life, gained more and
more the mastery over her mind, it expelled the lesser and the baser
passions, and the old mean revenge against an infant faded away before
the light of that awakening conscience which is often rekindled from
ashes by the sparks of a single better and worthier thought. And in the
resolute design to reclaim Jasper Losely, Arabella came at once to a
ground in common with his father, with his child. Oh what, too, would
the old man owe to her, what would be his gratitude, his joy, if she not
only guarded his spotless Sophy, but saved from the bottomless abyss
his guilty son! Thus when Arabella Crane had, nearly five years before,
sought Waife's discovered hiding-place, near the old bloodstained
Tower, mutual interests and sympathies had formed between them a bond
of alliance not the less strong because rather tacitly acknowledged than
openly expressed. Arabella had written to Waife from the Continent, for
the first half-year pretty often, and somewhat sanguinely, as to the
chance of Losely's ultimate reformation. Then the intervals of silence
became gradually more prolonged, and the letters more brief. But still,
whether from the wish not unnecessarily to pain the old man, or, as
would be more natural to her character, whic