"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