"And another ten."
"And another ten."
Not a word of encouragement or dissuasion was uttered by any one of the onlookers; they sat silent and amused, wondering which of the two was about to be smitten under the fifth rib. And at last it was Lionel's opponent who gave in.
"On this occasion," said he, depositing his half-sovereign, "I will simply gaze; what have you got?"
"Well, I have got a full hand," Lionel answered, putting down his hand on the table.
"That is good enough," the other said, stolidly. "Take away the money."
After this dire combat, the game fell flat a little; but interest was soon revived by a round of Jack-pots; and here again Lionel was in good luck. Indeed, when the players rose from the table about three o'clock, he might have come away a winner of close on £40 had not some reckless person called out something about whiskey poker. Now whiskey poker is the very stupidest form of gambling that the mind of man has ever conceived, though at the end of the evening some folk hunger after it as a kind of final fillip. Each person puts down a certain sum—it may be a sovereign, it may be five sovereigns; poker hands are dealt out, the cards being displayed face upwards on the table; there is no drawing; whoever has the best hand simply annexes the pool. It looks like a game, but it is not a game; it is merely cutting the cards; but, as the stakes can be doubled or trebled each round, the jaded appetite for gambling finds here a potent and 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 £10 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. Pandiani had nothing to tell him. The Signorina Antonia Rossi had not written to any of her Neapolitan friends, so far as could be ascertained, since the previous December; certainly she had not presented herself here in Naples to seek any engagement. The old maestro, in praying his illustrious and celebrated correspondent to accept his respectful submissions, likewise begged of him, should anything be