ures and your degraded feelings; and
the very best result that can happen, while it has no charms, seems to
your cowed mind impossible.

'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 sympathize with their fellow-beings. All the forms of
society had been forgotten. There was no snuff-box handed about now, for
courtesy, admiration, or a pinch; no affectation of occasionally making
a 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 flung down over his
callous, bloodless checks, straight as silk.

'Temple Grace looked as if he were blighted by lightning; and his
deep-blue eyes gleamed like a hyaena.

'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 L100,000.

'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