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
object, on regaining her, foiled (as it probably would have been), what
then might have become of her,--lost, perhaps, forever, to Waife,--in a
foreign land and under such guardianship? Grave question, which Jasper
Losely, who exercised so little foresight in the paramount question,
namely, what some day or other would become of himself? was not likely to
rack his brains by conjecturing!

Meanwhile Mrs. Crane was vigilant. The detective police-officer sent to