CHAPTER IX.
The wreck and the life-boat in a fog.
The next day, a little after noon, Jasper Losely, coming back from Alhambra Villa—furious, desperate, knowing not where to turn for bread, or on whom to pour his rage—beheld suddenly, in a quiet, half-built street, which led from the suburb to the New Road, Arabella Crane standing right in his path. She had emerged from one of the many straight intersecting roads which characterize that crude nebula of a future city: and the woman and the man met thus face to face; not another passer-by visible in the thoroughfare; at a distance the dozing hack cabstand; round and about them carcasses of brick and mortar—some with gaunt scaffolding fixed into their ribs, and all looking yet more weird in their raw struggle into shape through the livid haze of a yellow fog.
Losely, seeing Arabella thus planted in his way, recoiled; and the superstition in which he had long associated her image with baffled schemes and perilous hours, sent the wrathful blood back through his veins so quickly that he heard his heart beat!
Mrs. Crane. "So! You see we cannot help meeting, Jasper dear, do what you will to shun me."
Losely. "I—I—you always startle me so!—you are in town, then? to stay?—your old quarters?"
Mrs. Crane. "Why ask? You cannot wish to know where I am—you would not call. But how fares it?—what do you do?—how do you live? You look ill—Poor Jasper!"
Losely (fiercely). 'Hang your pity, and give me some money."
Mrs. Crane (calmly laying her lean hand on the arm which was darted forward more in menace than entreaty, and actually terrifying the Gladiator as she linked that deadly arm into her own). "I said you would always find me when at the worst of your troubles. And so, Jasper, it shall be till this right hand of yours is powerless as the clay at your feet. Walk—walk; you are not afraid of me?—walk on, tell me all. Where have you just been?"
Jasper, therewith reminded of his wrongs, poured out a volley of abuse on Poole, communicating to Mrs. Crane the whole story of his claims on that gentleman—the loss of the pocket-book filched from him, and Poole's knowledge that he was thus disarmed.
