he moment Poole had conscientiously cleared some
necessary arrears of work. While this correspondence went on, Jasper
Losely shunned Mrs. Crane, and took his meals and spent his leisure
hours with Madame Caumartin. He needed no dressing-gown and slippers to
feel himself at home there. Madame Canmartin had really taken a showy
house in a genteel street. Her own appearance was eminently what the
French call _distingue_; dressed to perfection from head to foot;
neat and finished as an epigram; her face in shape like a thoroughbred
cobra-capella,--low smooth frontal widening at the summit, chin tapering
but jaw strong, teeth marvellously white, small, and with points sharp
as those in the maw of the fish called the "Sea Devil;" eyes like
dark emeralds, of which the pupils, when she was angry or when she was
scheming, retreated upward towards the temples, emitting a luminous
green ray that shot through space like the gleam that escapes from a
dark-lantern; complexion superlatively feminine (call it not pale but
white, as if she lived on blanched almonds, peach-stones, and arsenic);
hands so fine and so bloodless, with fingers so pointedly taper there
seemed stings at their tips; manners of one who had ranged all ranks of
society from highest to lowest, and duped the most wary in each of them.
Did she please it, a crown prince might have thought her youth must have
passed in the chambers of porphyry! Did she please it, an old soldier
would have sworn the creature had been a vivandiere,--in age, perhaps,
bordering on forty. She looked younger, but had she been a hundred and
twenty, she could not have been more wicked. Ah, happy indeed for
Sophy, if it were to save her youth from ever being fostered in elegant
boudoirs by those bloodless hands, that the crippled vagabond had borne
her away from Arabella's less cruel unkindness; better far even Rugge's
village stage; better far stealthy by-lanes, feigned names, and the
erudite tricks of Sir Isaac!

But still it is due even to Jasper to state here that, in Losely's
recent design to transfer Sophy from Mr. Waife's care to that of Madame
Caumartin, the Sharper harboured no idea of a villany so execrable as
the character of the Parisienne led the jealous Arabella to suspect. His
real object in getting the child at that time once more into his
power was (whatever its nature) harmless compared with the mildest of
Arabella's dark doubts. But still if Sophy had been regained, and the
ob