Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/283

 counsel, sweet promises of filial performances. Happy, thrice happy, as an after remembrance, be the final parting between hopeful son and fearful parent at the foot of that mystic bridge, which starts from the threshold of home,—lost in the dimness of the far-opposing shore!--bridge over which goes the boy who will never return but as the man.

CHAPTER XII.

The pocket-cannibal baits his woman's trap with love-letters, and a widow allured steals timidly towards it from under the weeds.

Jasper Losely is beginning to be hard up! The infallible calculation at rouge-et-noir has carried off all that capital which had accumulated from the savings of the young gentlemen whom Dolly Poole had contributed to his exchequer. Poole himself is beset by duns, and pathetically observes "that he has lost three stone in weight, and that he believes the calves to his legs are gone to enlarge his liver."

Jasper is compelled to put down his cabriolet, to discharge his groom, to retire from his fashionable lodgings; and just when the prospect even of a dinner becomes dim, he bethinks himself of Arabella Crane, and remembers that she promised him L5, nay L10, which are still due from her. He calls; he is received like the prodigal son. Nay, to his own surprise, he finds Mrs. Crane has made her house much more inviting: the drawing-rooms are cleaned up; the addition of a few easy articles of furniture gives them quite a comfortable air. She herself has improved in costume, though her favourite colour still remains iron gray. She informs Jasper that she fully expected him; that these preparations are in his honour; that she has engaged a very good cook; that she hopes he will dine with her when not better engaged; in short, lets him feel himself at home in Podden Place.

Jasper at first suspected a sinister design, under civilities that his conscience told him were unmerited,—a design to entrap him into that matrimonial alliance which he had so ungallantly scouted, and from which he still recoiled with an abhorrence which man is not justified in feeling for any connubial partner less preternaturally terrific than the Witch of Endor or the Bleeding Nun!

But Mrs. Crane quickly and candidly hastened to dispel his ungenerous apprehensions. She had given up, she