untroubled and unmoved is as possible as it
is politic. Now he suffered, he suffered dumbly as a dog, passionately
as a barbarian; now he was met by that which, in the moment of its
dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, and escaped his light
philosophies.

"Oh, God!" he thought, "if it were anything--anything--except Disgrace!"

In a miserable den, an hour or so before--there are miserable dens even
in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, where crowned heads
are numberless as couriers, and great ministers must sometimes be
content with a shakedown--two men sat in consultation. Though the
chamber was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various expensive
wines and liqueurs. Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected
this poor place from motives of concealment rather than of necessity.
One of them was the "welsher," Ben Davis; the other, a smaller, quieter
man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive-tinted skin, a
Jew, Ezra Baroni. The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally silent; the
"welsher," heated, eager, flushed with triumph, and glowing with a
gloating malignity. Excitement and the fire of very strong wines,
of whose vintage brandy formed a large part, had made him voluble in
exultation; the monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him
in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of
success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his
teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have
furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of
delighted tyranny.

"That precious Guards' swell!" he muttered gloatingly, for the hundredth
time. "I've paid him out at last! He won't take a 'walk over' again in
a hurry. Cuss them swells! They allays die so game; it ain't half a go
after all, giving 'em a facer; they just come up to time so cool under
it all, and never show they are down, even when their backers throw up
the sponge. You can't make 'em give in, not even when they're mortal
hit; that's the crusher of it."

"Vell, vhat matter that ven you have hit 'em?" expostulated the more
philosophic Jew.

"Why, it is a fleecing of one," retorted the welsher savagely, even amid
his successes. "A clear fleecing of one. If one gets the better of a
dandy chap like that, and brings him down neat and clean, one ought
to have the spice of it. One ought to see him wince and--cuss 'em
all!--that's ju