What Will He Do With It? Book VIII

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 characterise 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 cab-stand; round and about them carcases 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 living 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 be heard his heart beat!