us moment, sworn that he would
"go to the devil," and had afterwards found himself so ill-suited to
that hasty enterprise, that he had been somewhat put to it to get
started on the downward path.

He was the only son of a Wall Street magnate who had had the misfortune
to let his "transactions" get the better of him. Dirke often thought of
his father when he watched the faces of the men about the "wheel." There
was little in the outer aspect, even of the men of civilized traditions
who stood among the gamblers, to remind him of the well-dressed,
well-groomed person of his once prosperous parent. But in their faces,
when the luck went against them, was a look that he was poignantly
familiar with; a look which had first dawned in his father's face,
flickeringly, intermittently, and which had grown and intensified, week
after week, month after month, till it had gone out in the blankness of
despair. That was when the elder Dirke heard his sentence of
imprisonment. For Aaron Dirke's failure had involved moral as well as
financial ruin.

He had died of the shock, as some of his creditors thought it behooved
him to do,--died in prison after one week's durance. His son envied him;
but dying is difficult in early youth, and Dabney Dirke did not quite
know how to set about.

Sometimes when he gave the wheel the fateful turn, he tried to cheat
himself with an idea that it obeyed his will, this wonderful, dizzying,
maddening wheel, with its circle of helpless victims. But there were
moments when he felt himself more at the mercy of the wheel than any
wretched gambler of them all. As he stood, with his curiously rigid
countenance, performing his monotonous functions in the peculiar silence
which characterizes the group around a gaming table, he sometimes felt
himself in the tangible grasp of Fate; as if the figures surrounding the
table had been but pictures on his brain, and he, the puppet
impersonating Fate to them, the real and only victim of chance. At such
times he could get free from this imaginary bondage only by a deliberate
summoning up of those facts of his previous existence which alone seemed
convincingly real. They marshalled themselves readily enough at his
bidding, those ruthless invaders of an easy, indolent life;--penury and
disgrace, wounded pride and disappointed love, and, bringing up the
rear, that firm yet futile resolve of his to go to the devil. Dabney
Dirke, with his tragic intensity, had often been the o