s keenly excited by the strange gestures of
the two contracting parties. When Castanier returned, there was a
sudden outburst of amazed exclamation. As in the Assembly where the
least event immediately attracts attention, all faces were turned to
the two men who had caused the sensation, and a shiver passed through
all beholders at the change that had taken place in them.

The men who form the moving crowd that fills the Stock Exchange are
soon known to each other by sight. They watch each other like players
round a card table. Some shrewd observers can tell how a man will play
and the condition of his exchequer from a survey of his face; and the
Stock Exchange is simply a vast card table. Everyone, therefore, had
noticed Claparon and Castanier. The latter (like the Irishman before
him[1]) had been muscular and powerful, his eyes were full of light,
his color high. The dignity and power in his face had struck awe into
them all; they wondered how old Castanier had come by it; and now they
beheld Castanier divested of his power, shrunken, wrinkled, aged, and
feeble. He had drawn Claparon out of the crowd with the energy of a
sick man in a fever fit; he had looked like an opium eater during the
brief period of excitement that the drug can give; now, on his return,
he seemed to be in the condition of utter exhaustion in which the
patient dies after the fever departs, or to be suffering from the
horrible prostration that follows on excessive indulgence in the
delights of narcotics. The infernal power that had upheld him through
his debauches had left him, and the body was left unaided and alone to
endure the agony of remorse and the heavy burden of sincere repentance.
Claparon's troubles everyone could guess; but Claparon reappeared, on
the other hand, with sparkling eyes, holding his head high with the
pride of Lucifer. The crisis had passed from the one man to the other.

[1] Referring to John Melmoth--see note at head of this story.--EDITOR.

"Now you can drop off with an easy mind, old man," said Claparon to
Castanier.

"For pity's sake, send for a cab and for a priest; send for the curate
of Saint-Sulpice!" answered the old dragoon, sinking down upon the
curbstone.

The words "a priest" reached the ears of several people, and produced
uproarious jeering among the stockbrokers, for faith with these
gentlemen means a belief that a scrap of paper called a mortgage
represents an estate, and the List of Fundholders is