omething. No one offered to give over; and everyone,
perhaps, felt that his object was not obtained. They made their toilets
and went down-stairs to breakfast. In the meantime the shutters were
opened, the room aired, and in less than an hour they were at it again.

They played till dinner-time without intermission; and though the Duke
made some desperate efforts, and some successful ones, his losses were,
nevertheless, trebled. Yet he ate an excellent dinner and was not at
all depressed; because the more he lost, the more his courage and his
resources seemed to expand. At first he had limited himself to ten
thousand; after breakfast it was to have been twenty thousand; then
thirty thousand was the ultimatum; and now he dismissed all thoughts of
limits from his mind, and was determined to risk or gain everything.

At midnight, he had lost forty-eight thousand pounds. Affairs now began
to be serious. His supper was not so hearty. While the rest were eating,
he walked about the room, and began to limit his ambition to recovery,
and not to gain. When you play to win back, the fun is over: there is
nothing to recompense you for your bodily tortures and your degraded
feelings; and the very best result that can happen, while it has no
charms, seems to your cowed mind impossible.

[Illustration: page338]

On they played, and the Duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He
floundered, he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough.
Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on
each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a
gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that his losses were
prodigious.

Another morning came, and there they sat, ankle-deep in cards. No
attempt at breakfast now, no affectation of making a toilet or airing
the room. The atmosphere was hot, to be sure, but it well became such a
Hell. There they sat, in total, in positive forgetfulness of everything
but the hot game they were hunting down. There was not a man in the
room, except Tom Cogit, who could have told you the name of the town
in which they were living. There they sat, almost breathless, watching
every turn with the fell look in their cannibal eyes which showed their
total inability to sympathise with their fellow-beings. All forms of
society had been long forgotten. There was no snuff-box handed
about now, for courtesy, admiration, or a pinch; no affectation of
occasionally making a