Losely?--it is, it
is. You are crazed, you are bewitched, miss!"

"Possibly I am crazed,--possibly bewitched; but I take that man's life
to mine as a penance for all the evil mine has ever known; and a day or
two since I should have said, with rage and shame, 'I cannot help it; I
loathe myself that I can care what becomes of him.' Now, without rage,
without shame, I say, 'The man whom I once so loved shall not die on a
gibbet if I can help it' and, please Heaven, help it I will."

The grim woman folded her arms on her breast, and raising her head to
its full height, there was in her face and air a stern gloomy grandeur,
which could not have been seen without a mixed sensation of compassion
and awe.

"Go now, Bridget; I have said all. He will be here soon: he will come;
he must come; he has no choice; and then--and then--" she closed her
eyes, bowed her head, and shivered.

Arabella Crane was, as usual, right in her predictions. Before noon
Jasper came,--came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong
sinister 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 Podden Place, slunk
into Arabella Crane's prim drawing-room, and said sullenly, "All is up;
here I am!"

Three days afterwards, 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 apartment, 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 designed by Mr. Bentham's reformatory
Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings towards
Jasper Losely (and what those feelings were no virile pen can presume
authoritatively to define; for lived there ever a man who 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 Podden Place,
had their intimacy been restricted to the aust