fiery stimulant just as the party breaks up.
Lionel was not anxious to get away with the money he had won. It was he
who proposed to increase the stakes to L10 from each player--which the
rest of them, to their credit be it said, refused to do. In the end,
when they went to get their hats and coats before issuing into the
morning air, some one happened to ask Lionel how he had come off on the
whole night; and he replied that he did not think he had either won or
lost anything to speak of. He hardly knew. Certainly he did not seem to
care.

The dawn was not yet. The gas-lamps shone in the murky thoroughfares as
he set out for Piccadilly--alone. The others all went away in hansoms;
he preferred to walk. And even when he reached his rooms, he did not go
to bed at once; he sat up thinking, a prey to a strange sort of
restlessness that had of late taken possession of him. For this young
man's gay and happy butterfly-life was entirely gone. The tragic
disappearance of Nina, followed by the sudden shattering of all his
visionary hopes in connection with Honnor Cunyngham, had left him in a
troubled, anxious, morbid state that he himself, perhaps, could not well
have accounted for. Then the sense of solitariness that he had
experienced when he found that Nina had so unexpectedly vanished from
his ken had been intensified since he had taken to declining invitations
from his fashionable friends, and spending his nights in the aimless
distraction of gambling at the Garden Club. Was there a touch of hurt
pride in his withdrawal from the society of those who in former days
used to be called "the great"? At least he discovered this, that if he
did wish to withdraw from their society, nothing in the world was
easier. They did not importune him. He was free to go his own way.
Perhaps this also wounded him; perhaps it was to revenge himself that he
sought to increase his popularity with the crowd; at night he sang with
a sort of bravado to bring down the house; in the day-time it comforted
him to perceive from a distance in that or the other window a goodly
display of his photographs, which he had learned to recognize from afar.
But in whatever direction these wayward moods drew him or tossed him,
there was ever this all-pervading disquiet, and a haunting regret that
almost savored of remorse, and a sick impatience of the slow-passing and
lonely hours.

He had given up all hopes of hearing from Nina now or of gaining any
news of her. P