with a hang-dog and jaded look, and taciturn
and half desperate. But he called for whiskey, and drank a glass of that
cordial, and brewed a jug of punch in silence, and swallowed glass after
glass, and got up a little, and grew courageous and flushed, and prated
away, rather loud and thickly with a hiccough now and then, and got to
sleep earlier than usual.

Somewhere among the 'small hours' of the night he awoke suddenly,
recollecting something.

'I have it,' cried Sturk, with an oath, and an involuntary kick at the
foot-board, that made his slumbering helpmate bounce.

'What is it, Barney, dear?' squalled she, diving under the bed-clothes,
with her heart in her mouth.

'It's like a revelation,' cried Sturk, with another oath; and that was
all Mrs. Sturk heard of it for some time. But the surgeon was wide
awake, and all alive about it, whatever it was. He sat straight up in
the bed, with his lips energetically compressed, and his eyebrows
screwed together, and his shrewd, hard eyes rolling thoughtfully over
the curtains, in the dark, and now and then an ejaculation of wonder,
or a short oath, would slowly rise up, and burst from his lips, like a
great bubble from the fermentation.

Sturk's brain was in a hubbub. He had fifty plans, all jostling and
clamouring together, like a nursery of unruly imps--'Take _me_'--'No,
take _me_'--'No, _me_!' He had been dreaming like mad, and his sensorium
was still all alive with the images of fifty phantasmagoria, filled up
by imagination and conjecture, and a strange, painfully-sharp
remembrance of things past--all whirling in a carnival of roystering but
dismal riot--masks and dice, laughter, maledictions, and drumming, fair
ladies, tipsy youths, mountebanks, and assassins: tinkling serenades,
the fatal clang and rattle of the dice-box, and long drawn, distant
screams.

There was no more use in Sturk's endeavours to reduce all this to order,
than in reading the Riot Act to a Walpurgis gathering. So he sat
muttering unconscious ejaculations, and looking down, as it were, from
his balcony, waiting for the uproar to abate; and when the air did clear
and cool a little, there was just one face that remained impassive, and
serenely winked before his eyes.

When things arrived at this stage, and he had gathered his recollections
about him, and found himself capable of thinking, being a man of action,
up he bounced and struck a light, vaulted into his breeches, hauled on
his stocki