"She is gone!" sobbed Mrs. Gormerick; and seeing the lifted arm and clenched fist of the manager, prudently fainted away.
CHAPTER VIII.
Corollaries from the problem suggested in Chapters VI. and VII.
Broad daylight, nearly nine o'clock indeed, and Jasper Losely is walking back to his inn from the place at which he had dined the evening before. He has spent the night drinking, gambling, and though he looks heated, there is no sign of fatigue. Nature in wasting on this man many of her most glorious elements of happiness, had not forgotten a Herculean constitution—always restless and never tired, always drinking and never drunk. Certainly it is some consolation to delicate individuals, that it seldom happens that the sickly are very wicked. Criminals are generally athletic—constitution and conscience equally tough; large backs to their heads—strong suspensorial muscles—digestions that save them from the over-fine nerves of the virtuous. The native animal must be vigorous in the human being, when the moral safeguards are daringly overleaped. Jasper was not alone, but with an acquaintance he had made at the dinner, and whom he invited to his inn at breakfast; they were walking familiarly arm in arm. Very unlike the brilliant Losely—a young man under thirty, who seemed to have washed out all the colors of youth in dirty water. His eyes dull, their whites yellow; his complexion sodden. His form was thick-set and heavy; his features pug, with a cross of the bull-dog. In dress, a specimen of the flash style of sporting man, as exhibited on the turf, or more often, perhaps, in the Ring; Belcher neckcloth, with an immense pin representing a jockey at full gallop; cut away coat, corduroy breeches, and boots with tops of a chalky white. Yet, withal, not the air and walk of a genuine born and bred sporting man, even of the vulgar order. Something about him which reveals the pretender. A would-be hawk with a pigeon's liver—a would-be sportsman with a cockney's nurture.
Samuel Adolphus Poole is an orphan of respectable connections. His future expectations chiefly rest on an uncle from whom, as godfather, he takes the loathed name of Samuel. He prefers to sign himself Adolphus; he is popularly styled Dolly. For his present existence he relies ostensibly on his salary as an assistant in the house of a London tradesman in a fashionable
