the hunting of foxes, the hounds were not in the neighborhood.  So he resolved to go through the house, and look at all those properties which were so soon to become his own.  And he at once strolled into the library.  This was a long, gloomy room, which contained perhaps ten thousand volumes, the greater number of which had, in the days of Mountjoy’s early youth, been brought together by his own father; and they had been bound in the bindings of modern times, so that the shelves were bright, although the room itself was gloomy.  He took out book after book, and told himself, with something of sadness in his heart, that they were all “caviare” to him.  Then he reminded himself that he was not yet thirty years of age, and that there was surely time enough left for him to make them his companions.

He took one at random, and found it to be a volume of Clarendon’s “History of the Rebellion.”  He pitched upon a sentence in which he counted that there were sixteen lines, and when he began to read it, it became to him utterly confused and unintelligible.  So he put it back, and went to another portion of the room and took down Wittier’s “Hallelujah;” and of this he could make neither head nor tail.  He was informed, by a heading in the book itself, that a piece of poetry was to be sung “as the ten commandments.”  He could not do that, and put the book back again, and declared to himself that farther search would be useless.  He looked round the room and tried to price the books, and told himself that three or four days at the club might see an end of it all.  Then he wandered on into the state drawing-room,—­an apartment which he had not entered for years,—­and found that all the furniture was carefully covered.  Of what use could it all be to him,—­unless that it, too, might be sent to the melting-pot and brought into some short-lived use at the club?

But as he was about to leave the room he stood for a moment on the rug before the fireplace and looked into the huge mirror which stood there.  If the walls might be his, as well as the garnishing of them, and if Florence Mountjoy could come and reign there, then he fancied that they all might be put to a better purpose than that of which he had thought.  In earlier days, two or three years ago, at a time which now seemed to him to be very distant, he had regarded Florence as his own, and as such had demanded her hand.  In the pride of his birth, and position, and fashion, he had had no thought of her feelings, and had been imperious.  He told himself that it had been so with much self-condemnation.  At any rate, he had learned, during those months of solitary wandering, the power of condemning himself.  And now he told him that if she would yet come he might still learn to sing that song of the old-fashioned poet “as to the ten commandments.”  At any rate, he would endeavor to sing it, as she bade him.

He went on through all the bedrooms, remembering, but hardly more than remembering, them as he entered them.  “Oh, Florence,—­my Florence!” he said, as he passed on.  He had done it all for himself,—­brought down upon his own head this infinite ruin,—­and for what?  He had scarcely ever won, and Tretton was gone from him forever.  But still there might yet be a chance if he could abstain from gambling.