"See her! What for?"

"What for! Hang it, it is natural that, now I am in England, I should
at least wish to know what she is like. And I think it very strange that
you should send her away, and then make all these difficulties. What's
your object? I don't understand it."

"My object? What could be my object but to serve you? At your request I
took, fed, reared a child, whom you could not expect me to love, at my
own cost. Did I ever ask you for a shilling? Did I ever suffer you to
give me one? Never! At last, hearing no more from you, and what little I
heard of you making me think that, if anything happened to me (and I was
very ill at the time), you could only find her a burden,--at last I say,
the old man came to me,--you had given him my address,--and he offered
to take her, and I consented. She is with him."

"The old man! She is with him! And where is he?"

"I don't know."

"Humph; how does he live? Can he have got any money?"

"I don't know."

"Did any old friends take him up?"

"Would he go to old friends?"

Mr. Losely tossed off two fresh glasses of brandy, one after the
other, and, rising, walked to and fro the room, his hands buried in his
pockets, and in no comfortable vein of reflection. At length he paused
and said, "Well, upon the whole, I don't see what I could do with the
girl just at present, though, of course, I ought to know where she is,
and with whom. Tell me, Mrs. Crane, what is she like,--pretty or plain?"

"I suppose the chit would be called pretty,--by some persons at least."

"Very pretty? handsome?" asked Losely, abruptly. "Handsome or not, what
does it signify? what good comes of beauty? You had beauty enough; what
have you done with it?"

At that question, Losely drew himself up with a sudden loftiness of look
and gesture, which, though prompted but by offended vanity, improved the
expression of the countenance, and restored to it much of its earlier
character. Mrs. Crane gazed on him, startled into admiration, and it was
in an altered voice, half reproachful, half bitter, that she continued,

"And now that you are satisfied about her, have you no questions to ask
about me?--what I do? how I live?" "My dear Mrs. Crane, I know that you
are comfortably off, and were never of a mercenary temper. I trust you
are happy, and so forth: I wish I were; things don't prosper with me. If
you could conveniently lend me a five-pound note--"

"You would borrow of me, Jasper? Ah! you come