ought it? The jaded elders,
the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical Italian himself,
felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger. Is he not wretched
indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be very helpless to receive
sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places,
where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and despair is
decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a new emotion in these torpid
hearts as the young man entered. Were not executioners known to shed
tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the
bidding of the Revolution?

The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks told
of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the suicide
had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines
about the corners of his mouth, and there was an abandonment about him
that was painful to see. Some sort of demon sparkled in the depths of
his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with pleasure. Could it have
been dissipation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once pure
and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor seeing the yellow circles
about his eyelids, and the color in his cheeks, would have set them
down to some affection of the heart or lungs, while poets would have
attributed them to the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to
night-vigils by the student's lamp.

But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When
a notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince among
them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined wretchedness
of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat
was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect
him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were not perfectly
clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear gloves. If the
very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because some traces
of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre, delicatel