Mountjoy had told the truth when he had said that nothing was a comfort.  Though it seemed to his father and to the people around him at Tretton that he had everything that a man could want, he had, in fact, nothing,—­nothing to satisfy him.  In the first place, he was quite alive to the misery of that decision given by the world against him, which had been of such comfort to his father.  Not a club in London would admit him.  He had been proclaimed a defaulter after such a fashion that all his clubs had sent to him for some explanation; and as he had given none, and had not answered their letters, his name had been crossed out in the books of them all.  He knew himself to be a man disgraced, and when he had fled from London he had gone under the conviction that he would certainly never return.  There were the pistol and bullet as his last assured resource; but a certain amount of good-fortune had awaited him,—­enough to save him from having recourse to their aid.  His brother had supplied him with small sums of money, and from time to time a morsel of good luck had enabled him to gamble, not to his heart’s content, but still in some manner so as to make his life bearable.  But now he was back in his own country, and he could gamble not at all, and hardly even see those old companions with whom he had lived.  It was not only for the card-tables that he sighed, but for the companions of the card-table.  And though he knew that he had been scratched out from the lists of all clubs as a dishonest man, he knew also, or thought that he knew, that he had been as honest as the best of those companions.  As long as he could by any possibility raise money he had paid it away, and by no false trick had he ever endeavored to get it back again.

Had a little time been allowed him all would have been paid; and all had been paid.  He knew that by the rules of such institutions time could not be granted; but still he did not feel himself to have been a dishonest man.  Yet he had been so disgraced that he could hardly venture to walk about the streets of London in the daylight.  And then there came upon him, when he found himself alone at Tretton, an irrepressible desire for gambling.  It was as though his throat were parched with an implacable thirst.  He walked about ever meditating certain fortunate turns of the cards; and when he had worked himself up to some realization of his old excitement he would remember that it was all a vain and empty bubble.  He had money in his pocket, and could rush up to London if he would, and if he did so he could, no doubt, find some coarse hell at which he could stake it till it would be all gone; but the gates of the A——­ and the B——­ and the C——­ would be closed against him; and he would then be driven to feel that he had indeed fallen into the nethermost pit.  Were he once to play at such places as his mind painted to him he could never play at any other; and yet when the day drew nigh on which he was to go to London,