d it. From that time on, Vandover's only pleasure was
gambling. Night and day he sat over the cards, the passion growing upon
him as he continued to lose, for his ill luck was extraordinary. It was
a veritable mania, a wild blind frenzy that knew no limit. At first he
had contented himself with a game in which twenty or thirty dollars was
as much as he could win or lose at a sitting, but soon this palled upon
him; he was obliged to raise the stakes continually in order to arouse
in him the interest, the keen tense excitement, that his jaded nerves
craved.

The five hundred dollars that he had drawn from the ten thousand, the
first payment on his old home, melted away within a week. Only a few
years ago Vandover would have stopped to reflect upon the meaning of
this, would have resisted the temptation that drew him constantly to the
gambling-table, but the idea of resistance never so much as occurred to
him. He did not invest his fifteen thousand, but drew upon it
continually to satisfy his last new craze. It was not with any hope of
winning that he gambled--the desire of money was never strong in him--it
was only the love of the excitement of the moment.

Little by little the fifteen thousand in the bank dwindled. It did not
all go in cards. Certain habits of extravagance grew upon Vandover, the
natural outcome of his persistent gambling, the desire of winning easily
being balanced by the impulses to spend quickly. He took a certain
hysterical delight in flinging away money with both hands. Now it was
the chartering of a yacht for a ten-days' cruise about the bay, or it
was a bicycle bought one week and thrown away the next, a fresh suit of
clothes each month, gloves worn but once, gold-pieces thrust into
Flossie's pockets, suppers given to bouffe actresses--twenty-four-hour
acquaintances--a racehorse bought for eight hundred dollars, resold for
two hundred and fifty--rings and scarf-pins given away to the women and
girls of the Imperial, and a whole world of follies that his poor
distorted wits conceived from hour to hour. His judgment was gone, his
mind unbalanced. All his life Vandover had been sinking slowly lower and
lower; this, however, was the beginning of the last plunge. The process
of degeneration, though inevitable, had been gradual as long as he
indulged generally in all forms of evil; it was only now when a passion
for one particular vice absorbed him that he commenced to rush headlong
to his ruin.

The