"The gods be praised! it does, ma'am, I have had quite enough of her. But you are every inch a lady, and allow me to add that I put you on my free list for life." Rugge gone, Arabella Crane summoned Bridget to her presence. "Lor', miss," cried Bridget, impulsively, "who'd think you'd been up all night raking! I have not seen you look so well this many a year." "Ah," said Arabella Crane, "I will tell you why. I have done what for many a year I never thought I should do again,--a good action. That child,--that Sophy,--do you remember how cruelly I used her?" "Oh, miss, don't go for to blame yourself; you fed her, you clothed her, when her own father, the villing, sent her away from hisself to you,--you of all people, you. How could you be caressing and fawning on his child,--their child?" Mrs. Crane hung her head gloomily. "What is past is past. I have lived to save that child, and a curse seems lifted from my soul. Now listen. I shall leave London--England--probably this evening. You will keep this house; it will be ready for me any moment I return. The agent who collects my house-rents will give you money as you want it. Stint not yourself, Bridget. I have been saving and saving and saving for dreary years,--nothing else to interest me, and I am richer than I seem." "But where are you going, miss?" said Bridget, slowly recovering from the stupefaction occasioned by her mistress's announcement. "I don't know; I don't care." "Oh, gracious stars! is it with that dreadful Jasper 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!"