pressive; for the first time in his life he sought
refuge from thought in the stimulus of drink, and dashed down neat
Cognac as though it were iced Badminton, as he drove with his set off
the disastrous plains of Iffesheim. He shook himself free of them as
soon as he could; he felt the chatter round him insupportable; the men
were thoroughly good-hearted, and though they were sharply hit by the
day's issue, never even by implication hinted at owing the disaster to
their faith in him, but the very cordiality and sympathy they showed cut
him the keenest--the very knowledge of their forbearance made his own
thoughts darkest.

Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day's calamity
brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith these men had placed
in him, and the losses which his own mistaken security had caused them.
Granted he could neither guess nor avert the trickery which had brought
about his failure; but none the less did he feel that he had failed
them; none the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they showed
him sting him like a scourge.

He got away from them at last, and wandered out alone into the gardens
of the Stephanien, till the green trees of an alley shut him in in
solitude, and the only echo of the gay world of Baden was the strain of
a band, the light mirth of a laugh, or the roll of a carriage sounding
down the summer air.

It was eight o'clock; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless
splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow, and tinging to
bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest. In another hour he was the
expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party, where all that was
highest, fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every
nationality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this
radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every man worth
owning as such was his friend, and every woman whose smile he cared for
welcomed him, he knew himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as
the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house. No aid could serve him,
for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it; no
power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the
farthest would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps
dishonored man--a debtor and an alien.

Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash, trying
vainly to realize this thing which had come upon