to me in your troubles.
You shall have the money,--five pounds, ten pounds, what you please, but
you will call again for it: you need me now; you will not utterly desert
me now?"

"Best of creatures!--never!" He seized her hand and kissed it. She
withdrew it quickly from his clasp, and, glancing over him from head to
foot, said, "But are you really in want?--you are well-dressed, Jasper;
that you always were."

"Not always; three days ago very much the reverse: but I have had a
trifling aid, and--"

"Aid in England? from whom? where? Not from him whom you say you had the
courage to seek?"

"From whom else? Have I no claim? A miserable alms flung to me. Curse
him! I tell you that man's look and language so galled me,--so galled,"
echoed Losely, shifting his hold from the top of his switch to the
centre, and bringing the murderous weight of the lead down on the palm
of his other hand, "that, if his eye had quitted mine for a moment, I
think I must have brained him, and been--"

"Hanged!" said Mrs. Crane.

"Of course, hanged," returned Losely, resuming the reckless voice and
manner in which there was that peculiar levity which comes from hardness
of heart, as from the steel's hardness comes the blade's play. "But if a
man did not sometimes forget consequences, there would be an end of the
gallows. I am glad that his eye never left mine." And the leaden head of
the switch fell with a dull dumb sound on the floor.

Mrs. Crane made no immediate rejoinder, but fixed on her lawless visitor
a gaze in which there was no womanly fear (though Losely's aspect and
gesture might have sent a thrill through the nerves of many a hardy
man), but which was not without womanly compassion, her countenance
gradually softening more and more, as if under the influence of
recollections mournful but not hostile. At length she said in a low
voice, "Poor Jasper! Is all the vain ambition that made you so
false shrunk into a ferocity that finds you so powerless? Would your
existence, after all, have been harder, poorer, meaner, if your faith
had been kept to me?"

Evidently disliking that turn in the conversation, but checking a reply
which might have been rude had no visions of five pounds, ten pounds,
loomed in the distance, Mr. Losely said, "Pshaw! Bella, pshaw! I was a
fool, I dare say, and a sad dog, a very sad dog; but I had always the
greatest regard for you, and always shall! Hillo, what's that? A knock
at the door! Oh, by the by,