"Powers above! What has happened?" exclaimed Rugge, prophetically.

"She is gone," sobbed Mrs. Gormerick; and, seeing the lifted arm and
clenched fist of the manager, prudently fainted away.




CHAPTER VIII.

Corollaries from the problems suggested in chapters VI. and VII.

Broad daylight, nearly nine o'clock indeed, and Jasper Losely is walking
back to his inn from the place at which he had dined the evening before.
He has spent the night drinking, gambling, and though he looks heated,
there is no sign of fatigue. Nature, in wasting on this man many of her
most glorious elements of happiness, had not forgotten an herculean
constitution,--always restless and never tired, always drinking and never
drunk. Certainly it is some consolation to delicate invalids that it
seldom happens that the sickly are very wicked. Criminals are generally
athletic; constitution and conscience equally tough; large backs to their
heads; strong suspensorial muscles; digestions that save them from the
over-fine nerves of the virtuous. The native animal must be vigorous in
the human being, when the moral safeguards are daringly overleapt.
Jasper was not alone, but with an acquaintance he had made at the dinner,
and whom he invited to his inn to breakfast; they were walking familiarly
arm-in-arm. Very unlike the brilliant Losely,--a young man under thirty,
who seemed to have washed out all the colours of youth in dirty water.
His eyes dull, their whites yellow; his complexion sodden. His form was
thickset and heavy; his features pug, with a cross of the bull-dog. In