; though I
prefer the Dachstein in the wane of the afterglow. You called it
Carinthia.'

'I did: the beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus--if she is to be a girl!'
Fleetwood rejoined. 'She looked burnt out--a spectre.'

'One of the admirably damned,' said Woodseer, and he murmured with
enjoyment: 'Between the lights--that 's the beauty and the tragedy of
Purgatory!'

His comrade fell in with the pictured idea: 'You hit it:--not what you
called the "sublimely milky," and not squalid as you'll see the faces of
the gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me--may I beg?--don't clap
names on the mountains we've seen. It stamps guide-book on them, English
tourist, horrors. We'll moralize over the crowds at the tables down
there. On the whole, it's a fairish game: you know the odds against you,
as you don't on the Turf or the Bourse. Have your fling; but don't get
bitten. There's a virus. I'm not open to it. Others are.'

Hereupon Woodseer, wishing to have his individuality recognised in the
universality it consented to, remarked on an exchequer that could not
afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win.

These were, no doubt, good reasons for abstaining, and they were grand
morality. They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the unfleshed
in folly. They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the puking
inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally. He had a
sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his elemental
nature exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender to the
superhuman. For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite above
temptation. To see a forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim on
those tides, pulled along the current, and caught by the undertug of the
lasher, would be fun.

'We'll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what they're
doing,' he said, and stepped.

Woodseer would gladly have remained. The starlit black ridges about him
and the dragon's mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual
and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher. He
had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell
on an arm; a small matter.

Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party: and
Fleetwood's man-servant was absent.

'Gambling, the rascal!' he said. Woodseer heard the first note of the
place in that.

His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocki