, working at it very hard,--and very constantly.
No one ever saw him anywhere but at the club. At eight o'clock he went
home to dinner, let us hope to the wife of his bosom, and at eleven he
returned, and remained as long as there were men to play with. A tedious
and unsatisfactory life he had, and it would have been well for him
could his friends have procured on his behoof the comparative ease of a
stool in a counting-house. But, as no such Elysium was opened to him,
the major went on accepting the smaller profits and the harder work of
club life. In what regiment he had been a major no one knew or cared to
inquire. He had been received as Major Moody for twenty years or more,
and twenty years is surely time enough to settle a man's claim to a
majority without reference to the Army List.

"How are you, Major Moody?" asked Mountjoy.

"Not much to boast of. I hope you're pretty well, Captain Scarborough."
Beyond that there was no word of salutation, and no reference to
Mountjoy's wonderful absence.

"What's it to be:--twos and tens?" said Captain Vignolles, arranging the
cards and the chairs.

"Not for me," said Mountjoy, who seemed to have been enveloped by a most
unusual prudence.

"What! are you afraid,--you who used to fear neither man nor devil?"

"There is so much in not being accustomed to it," said Mountjoy. "I
haven't played a game of whist since I don't knew when."

"Twos and tens is heavy against dummy," said Major Moody.

"I'll take dummy, if you like it," said Vignolles. Moody only looked at
him.

"We'll each have our own dummy, of course," said Mountjoy.

"Just as you please," said Vignolles. "I'm host here, and of course will
give way to anything you may propose. What's it to be, Scarborough?"

"Pounds and fives. I shan't play higher than that." There came across
Mountjoy's mind, as he stated the stakes for which he consented to play,
a remembrance that in the old days he had always been called Captain
Scarborough by this man who now left out the captain. Of course he had
fallen since that,--fallen very low. He ought to feel obliged to any man,
who had in the old days been a member of the same club with him, who
would now greet him with the familiarity of his unadorned name. But the
remembrance of the old sounds came back upon his ear; and the
consciousness that, before his father's treatment of him, he had been
known to the world at large as Captain Scarborough, of Tretton.

"Well, well; po