cleared the lock from Sydney's obstructions,
his three friends in Mr. Windsor's carriage, driven by Reynolds, were
miles on their way toward that gentleman's steam yacht, which awaited
them in the harbor of Torquay.

CHAPTER XVI.

MRS. CAREY'S HUSBAND.

Oswald Carey's father had just died and left him a great fortune made
upon the Stock Exchange when the son met his wife for the first time at
the country-house of his father's old partner and his then
executor--Benjamin Bugbee. "Young Croesus," as he was then familiarly
called, fell head over heels in love with the beautiful daughter of the
penniless and disestablished clergyman, and during the short space of
his courtship and honeymoon he forgot the one thing which had previously
absorbed his life--the gaming-table. If his wife had been a good woman,
or if she had loved him, he might have stayed his hand from baccarat.
But Eleanor had married him simply because he was rich and good-natured
and she was ambitious and poor; and after their marriage she plunged
into the gayest of fashionable society.

At first Carey yawned in the anterooms of balls, waiting for his
beautiful wife, but after a while he tired of this; and, letting her go
into the world alone, he betook himself to the Turf and Jockey Club,
where the play ran very high, for there adventurers and gamesters of all
nations congregated--the rich Russian met his great rival wheat-grower
of America, and the price of great farms changed hands at poker or at
baccarat. The hawks who infested the club, eager for the quarry,
speedily settled upon such a plump pigeon as Carey, and while his wife
wore his diamonds at gay balls, night after night, he sat over the green
cloth, throwing away his youth and his fortune to the harpies. It began
to be whispered in a few years that "Young Croesus," the beauty's
husband, was cleaned out. The hawks found his I. O. U.'s were
unredeemed, and his gorgeous establishment in Mayfair was closed. By
some influence Carey succeeded in getting an appointment as a clerk in
the Stamp and Sealing Wax Office, while his wife went on in her career
as a "beauty."

At the office Carey matched for half-crowns with his fellow-clerks, read
the sporting news, and busied himself in computations, in connection
with his "system" by which he should infallibly win at cards. Little by
little his system absorbed the wrecks left to him of his fortune; and he
had nothing to live upon but his salary an