. There they sat, almost breathless,
watching every turn with the fell look in their cannibal eyes which
showed their total inability to sympathize with their fellow-beings.
All forms of society had been long forgotten. There was no snuff-box
handed about now, for courtesy, admiration, or a pinch; no affectation
of occasionally making a remark upon any other topic but the
all-engrossing one. Lord Castlefort rested with his arms on the table:
a false tooth had got unhinged. His Lordship, who, at any other time,
would have been most annoyed, coolly put it in his pocket. His cheeks
had fallen, and he looked twenty years older. Lord Dice had torn off
his cravat, and his hair hung down over his callous, bloodless cheeks,
straight as silk. Temple Grace looked as if he were blighted by
lightning; and his deep blue eyes gleamed like a hyena's. The Baron
was least changed. Tom Cogit, who smelt that the crisis was at hand,
was as quiet as a bribed rat.

On they played till six o'clock in the evening, and then they agreed to
desist till after dinner. Lord Dice threw himself on a sofa. Lord
Castlefort breathed with difficulty. The rest walked about. While they
were resting on their oars, the young Duke roughly made up his accounts.
He found that he was minus about one hundred thousand pounds.

Immense as this loss was, he was more struck, more appalled, let us
say, at the strangeness of the surrounding scene, than even by his own
ruin. As he looked upon his fellow gamesters, he seemed, for the first
time in his life, to gaze upon some of those hideous demons of whom he
had read. He looked in the mirror at himself. A blight seemed to have
fallen over his beauty, and his presence seemed accursed. He had
pursued a dissipated, even more than a dissipated career. Many were
the nights that had been spent by him not on his couch; great had been
the exhaustion that he had often experienced; haggard had sometimes
even been the lustre of his youth. But when had been marked upon his
brow this harrowing care? when had his features before been stamped
with this anxiety, this anguish, this baffled desire, this strange
unearthly scowl, which made him even tremble? What! was it possible?
it could not be, that in time he was to be like those awful, those
unearthly, those unhallowed things that were around him. He felt as if
he had fallen from his state, as if he had dishonored his ancestry, as
if he had betrayed his trust. He felt a criminal. In t