"Ay, no better picklock in good hands. But there are other things
besides locks to think of."

Cutts then hurried on to suggest that it was just the hour when some of
the workmen employed on the premises might be found in the Fawley public-
house; that he should ride on, dismount there, and take his chance of
picking up details of useful information as to localities and household.
He should represent himself as a commercial traveller on his road to the
town they had quitted; he should take out his cheap newspapers and
tracts; he should talk politics--all workmen love politics, especially
the politics of cheap newspapers and tracts. He would rejoin Losely in
an hour or so.

The bravo waited--his horse grazed--the moon came forth, stealing through
the trees, bringing into fantastic light the melancholy old dwelling-
house--the yet more melancholy new pile. Jasper was not, as we have
seen, without certain superstitious fancies, and they had grown on him
more of late as his brain had become chronically heated and his nerves
relaxed by pain. He began to feel the awe of the silence and the
moonlight; and some vague remembrances of earlier guiltless days--of a
father's genial love--of joyous sensations in the priceless possession of
youth and vigour--of the admiring smiles and cordial hands which his
beauty, his daring, and high spirits had attracted towards him--of the
all that he had been, mixed with the consciousness of what he was, and an
uneasy conjecture of the probable depth of the final fall--came dimly
over his thoughts, and seemed like the whispers of remorse. But it is
rarely that man continues to lay blame on himself; and Jasper hastened to
do, as many a better person does without a blush for his folly--viz.,
shift upon the innocent shoulders of fellow-men, or on the hazy outlines