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388 al 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, honorable 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 distinguce person, and which she had prepared years ago with her own bloodless hands, and no doubt scientifically tested its effect on others. The cobra capella is gone at last! "Souviens-toi de ta Gabrielle" O Jasper Losely! But why Arabella Crane should thus continue to watch over him whom she no longer professed to love—how she should thus have acquired the gift of ubiquity and the power to save him—Jasper Losely could not conjecture. The whole thing seemed to him weird and supernatural. Most truly did he say that she had cowed him. He had often longed to strangle her; when absent from her, had often resolved upon that act of gratitude. The moment he came in sight of her stern, haggard face—her piercing lurid eyes—the moment he heard her slow, dry voice in some such sentences as these: " Again you come to me in your trouble, and ever shall. Am I not still as your mother, but with a wife's fidelity, till death us do part? There is the portrait of what you were—look at it, Jasper. Now turn to the glass—see what you are. Think of the fate of Gabrielle Desmarets! But for me what, long since, had been your own? But I will save you—I have sworn it. You shall be wax in these hands at last; " the moment that voice thus claimed and insisted on redeeming him, the ruffian felt a cold shudder—his courage oozed—he could no more have nerved his arm against her than a Thug would have lifted his against the dire goddess of his murderous superstition.

Jasper could not resist a belief that the life of this dreadful protectress was, somehow or other, made essential to his—that, were she to die, he should perish in some ghastly and preternatural expiation. But for the last few months lie had, at length, escaped from her—diving so low, so deep into the mud, that even her net could not mesh him. Hence, perhaps, the immi-