need of a few hundreds for pocket money. The nobleman's name stood high. His fortune was universally known; his honor unimpeachable. A bill of his anyone would cash at sight. Could Poole but obtain that bill! It had, he believed, only a few weeks yet to run. Jasper or Madame Caumartin might get it discounted even by Lord 's own banker; and if that were too bold, by any professional bill-broker; and all three be off before a suspicion could arise. But to get at that safe a false key might be necessary. Poole suggested a waxen impression of the lock. Jasper sent him a readier contrivance a queer-looking tool that looked an instrument of torture. All now necessary was for Poole to recover sufficiently to return to business, and to get rid of Uncle Sam by a promise to run down to the country the moment Poole had conscientiously cleared some necessary arrears of work. While this correspondence went on, Jasper Losely shunned Mrs. Crane, and took his meals and spent his leisure hours with Madame Caumartin.
He needed no dressing-gown and slippers to feel himself at home there.
Madame Caumartin had really taken a showy house in a genteel street. Her own appearance was eminently what the French call dist'mgiue. Dressed to perfection, from head to foot; neat and finished as an epigram. Her face, in shape like a thoroughbred cobra capella—low, smooth frontal, widening at the summit; chin tapering, but jaw strong; teeth marvellously white, small, and with points sharp as those in the maw of the fish called the "Sea Devil;" eyes like dark emeralds, of which the pupils, when she was angry or when she was scheming, retreated upward toward the temples, emitting a luminous green ray that shot through space like the gleam that escapes from a dark lantern; complexion superlatively feminine call it not pale, but white, as if she lived on blanched almonds, peach stones and arsenic; hands so fine and so bloodless, with fingers so pointedly taper there seemed stings at their tips; manners of one who had ranged all ranks of society, from highest to lowest, and duped the most wary in each of them. Did she please it, a crown prince might have thought her youth must have passed in the chambers of porphyry! Did she please it, an old soldier would have sworn the creature had been a vivandiere. In age, perhaps bordering on forty. She looked younger, but had she been a hundred and twenty she could not have been more wicked. Ah! happy, indeed, for Sophy, if it were to save her youth from ever being fostered in elegant boudoirs by those bloodless hands, that the crippled vagabond had borne her away
