thoughts for the morrow--he could not
stand to think of it any more than he could of any other calamity. Like
the certainty of death, he tried to shut the certainty of soon being
without a dollar completely out of his mind, and he came very near doing
it.

Well-dressed guests moving to and fro over the thick carpets carried
him back to the old days. A young lady, a guest of the house, playing a
piano in an alcove pleased him. He sat there reading.

His dinner cost him $1.50. By eight o'clock he was through, and then,
seeing guests leaving and the crowd of pleasure-seekers thickening
outside wondered where he should go. Not home. Carrie would be up. No,
he would not go back there this evening. He would stay out and knock
around as a man who was independent--not broke--well might. He bought
a cigar, and went outside on the corner where other individuals were
lounging--brokers, racing people, thespians--his own flesh and blood.
As he stood there, he thought of the old evenings in Chicago, and how
he used to dispose of them. Many's the game he had had. This took him to
poker.

"I didn't do that thing right the other day," he thought, referring
to his loss of sixty dollars. "I shouldn't have weakened. I could have
bluffed that fellow down. I wasn't in form, that's what ailed me."

Then he studied the possibilities of the game as it had been played, and
began to figure how he might have won, in several instances, by bluffing
a little harder.

"I'm old enough to play poker and do something with it. I'll try my hand
to-night."

Visions of a big stake floated before him. Supposing he did win a couple
of hundred, wouldn't he be in it? Lots of sports he knew made their
living at this game, and a good living, too.

"They always had as much as I had," he thought.

So off he went to a poker room in the neighbourhood, feeling much as he
had in the old days. In this period of self-forgetfulness, aroused first
by the shock of argument and perfected by a dinner in the hotel, with
cocktails and cigars, he was as nearly like the old Hurstwood as he
would ever be again. It was not the old Hurstwood--only a man arguing
with a divided conscience and lured by a phantom.

This poker room was much like the other one, only it was a back room in
a better drinking resort. Hurstwood watched a while, and then, seeing
an interesting game, joined in. As before, it went easy for a while, he
winning a few times and cheering up, losing a few po