The lad objected to
the proposal made, objected fiercely and with vehemence; and at last
submitted only with reluctance. Submit in the end, however, he did, for
after some minutes of this private talk he went to his cloak, and
avoiding, as it seemed, his fellows' eyes, put it on. Berthaud
accompanied him to the door, and the winner's last words were audible.
"That is all," he said; "succeed in what I impose, M. de Bazan, and I
cry quits, and you shall have fifty crowns for your pains. Fail, and you
will but be paying your debt. But you will not fail. Remember, half an
hour after midnight. And courage!"

The young man nodded sullenly, and drawing his cloak about his throat,
went through the passage to the street. The night was a little older
than when he had entered, otherwise it was unchanged. The rain was still
falling; the wind still buffeted the creaking shutters and the swinging
sign-boards. But the man? He had entered, thinking nothing of rain or
wind, thinking little even of the horse and furniture, and the good
clothes made under his mother's eye, which he had sacrificed to refill
his purse. The warmth of the play fever coursing through his veins had
clad him in proof against cold and damp and the depression of the gloomy
streets, even against the thought of home. And for the good horse, and
the laced shirts and the gold braid, the luck could not run against him
again! He would win all back, and the crowns to boot.

So he had thought as he went in. And now? He stood a moment in the dark,
narrow chasm of a street, and looked up, letting the rain cool his brow;
looked up, and, seeing a wrack of clouds moving swiftly across the slit
of stormy sky visible between the overhanging roofs, faced in a dull
amazement the fact that he who now stood in the darkness, bankrupt even
in life, was the same man who had entered Paris so rich in hope and
youth and life a week--only a week--before. He remembered--it was an odd
thing to occur to him when his thoughts should have been full of the
events of the last hour--a fault of which he had been guilty down there
in the country; and of which, taking advantage of a wrathful father's
offer to start him in Paris, he had left the weaker sinner to bear the
brunt. And it seemed to him that here was his punishment. The old grey
house at home, quaint and weather-beaten, rose before him. He saw his
mother's herb-garden, the great stackyard, and the dry moat, half filled
with blackberry bu