remark upon any other topic but the all-engrossing
one. Lord Castlefort rested with his arms on the table: a false tooth
had got unhinged. His Lordship, who, at any other time, would have been
most annoyed, coolly put it in his pocket. His cheeks had fallen, and
he looked twenty years older. Lord Dice had torn off his cravat, and
his hair hung down over his callous, bloodless cheeks, straight as silk.
Temple Grace looked as if he were blighted by lightning; and his deep
blue eyes gleamed like a hyaena's. The Baron was least changed. Tom
Cogit, who smelt that the crisis was at hand, was as quiet as a bribed
rat.

On they played till six o'clock in the evening, and then they agreed
to desist till after dinner. Lord Dice threw himself on a sofa. Lord
Castlefort breathed with difficulty. The rest walked about. While they
were resting on their oars, the young Duke roughly made up his accounts.
He found that he was minus about one hundred thousand pounds.

Immense as this loss was, he was more struck, more appalled, let us say,
at the strangeness of the surrounding scene, than even by his own ruin.
As he looked upon his fellow gamesters, he seemed, for the first time in
his life, to gaze upon some of those hideous demons of whom he had read.
He looked in the mirror at himself. A blight seemed to have fallen
over his beauty, and his presence seemed accursed. He had pursued a
dissipated, even more than a dissipated career. Many were the nights
that had been spent by him not on his couch; great had been the
exhaustion that he had often experienced; haggard had sometimes even
been the lustre of his youth. But when had been marked upon his brow
this harrowing care? when had his features before been stamped with
this anxiety, this anguish, this baffled desire, this strange unearthly
scowl, which made him even tremble? What! was it possible? it could not
be, that in time he was to be like those awful, those unearthly, those
unhallowed things that were around him. He felt as if he had fallen from
his state, as if he had dishonoured his ancestry, as if he had betrayed
his trust. He felt a criminal. In the darkness of his meditations a
flash burst from his lurid mind, a celestial light appeared to dissipate
this thickening gloom, and his soul felt as if it were bathed with the
softening radiancy. He thought of May Dacre, he thought of everything
that was pure, and holy, and beautiful, and luminous, and calm. It was
the innate virtue