king's.

"Why the ---- did you talk of that witch?" he cried peevishly to Cutts,
who was composing himself to rest on the floor. "I swear I fancy I feel
her sitting on my chest like a nightmare."

He turned with a vehemence which shook the walls, and wrapped the
coverlet round him, plunging his head into its folds. Strange though it
seem to the novice in human nature, to Jasper Losely the woman who had so
long lived but for one object--namely, to save him from the gibbet--was
as his evil genius, his haunting fiend. He had conceived a profound
terror of her from the moment he perceived that she was resolutely bent
upon making him honest. He had broken from her years ago, fled, resumed
his evil courses, hid himself from her,--in vain. Wherever he went,
there went she. He might baffle the police, not her. Hunger had often
forced him to accept her aid. As soon as he received it, he hid from her
again, burying himself deeper and deeper in the mud, like a persecuted
tench. He associated her idea with all the ill-luck that had befallen
him. Several times some villanous scheme on which he had counted to make
his fortune had been baffled in the most mysterious way; and just when
baffled, and there seemed no choice but to cut his own throat or some one
else's, up turned grim Arabella Crane, in the iron-gray gown, and with
the iron-gray ringlets,--hatefully, awfully beneficent,--offering food,
shelter, gold,--and some demoniacal, honourable work. Often had he been
in imminent peril from watchful law or treacherous accomplice. She had
warned and saved him, as she had saved him from the fell Gabrielle
Desmarets, who, unable to bear the sentence of penal servitude, after a
long process, defended with astonishing skill and enlisting the romantic
sympathies of young France, had contrived to escape into another world by
means of a subtle poison concealed about her /distinguee/ person, and