"I will tell her I have sold my Nero for three hundred pounds to a dealer, and this hundred and twenty-five is the sum paid down. That will open the door for fresh winnings!"
How happy did this falsehood make his little wife! At last, then, her Cecil admitted that something was to be done by art. Their future was secured.
Yet happiness grounded on such falsehoods must be fragile; and far wiser would it have been for Cecil to have told her the painful truth. She would have been shocked, terrified; she would have entreated him to gamble no more; there would have been "a scene," but who knows what good might not have resulted from it?
Cecil, like all weak men, sought refuge in a falsehood from the reproaches which he knew must follow an avowal.
CHAPTER X.
A GENTLEMAN'S LIFE.
"Your days are tedious, your hours burdensome:
And wer't not for full suppers, midnight revels,
Dancing, wine, riotous meetings, which do drown
And bury quite in you all virtuous thoughts,
And on your eyelids hang so heavily
They have no power to look as high as heaven,
You'd sit and muse on nothing but despair."
DECKAR.
The next night and the next, Cecil played, and with varying fortunes, sometimes losing to the very last few pounds, at others rising to large gains. The end of the week found him a winner of some four hundred pounds.
He considered himself rich now, and looking on the gaming-table as a bank from which he could at any time draw largely, his first step was to move from Mrs. Tring's.
He took apartments in South Audley Street; furnished them with taste, and considerable luxury; engaged two servants, and began to live in a style more corresponding with his previous habits.