being somewhere struck and wounded.  What has befallen me, has in some form or other befallen them all.  They are trying, just as I am, to conceal their sorrows and their crimes from each other.  There is nothing else to do.  There is no such thing as happiness.  There is nothing but deception.  Some of the keener ones see through my mask as I see through theirs.  And yet some of them smile and look as gay as if they were really happy.  Perhaps I can throw off this weight that is crushing me, as they have thrown off theirs—­if I try a little harder.”  Such were the reflections which revolved ceaselessly within his brain.

But his efforts were in vain.  In this life he had but a single consolation, and that was in a friendship which from its nature did not and could not become an intimacy.

Among the many acquaintances he had made in that realm of life to which his vices and his crimes had consigned him, a single person had awakened in his bosom emotions of interest and regard.  There was in that circle of silent, terrible, remorseless parasites of society, a young man whose classical face, exquisite manners and varied accomplishments set him apart from all the others.  He moved among them like a ghost,—­mysterious, uncommunicative and unapproachable.

He had inspired in his companions a sort of unacknowledged respect, from the superiority of his professional code of ethics, for he never preyed upon the innocent, the weak, or the helpless, and gambled only with the rich or the crafty.  He victimized the victimizers, and signalized his triumph with a mocking smile in which there was no trace of bitterness, but only a gentle and humorous irony.

From the time of their first meeting he had treated David in an exceptional manner.  In unobserved ways he had done him little kindnesses, and proffered many delicate advances of friendship, and not many months passed before the two lonely, suspicious and ostracized men united their fortunes in a sort of informal partnership and were living in common apartments.

The most marked characteristic of this restricted friendship was a disposition to respect the privacy of each other’s lives and thoughts.  In all their intercourse through the year in which they had been thus associated they had never obtruded their personal affairs upon each other, nor pried into each other’s secrets.

There was in Foster Mantel a sort of sardonic humor into which he was always withdrawing himself.  In one of their infrequent conversations the two companions had grown unusually confidential and found themselves drifting a little too near that most dangerous of all shoals in the lives of such men—­the past.

With a swift, instinctive movement both of them turned away.  Each read in the other’s face consciousness of the impossibility of discussing those experiences through which they had come to be what they were.  Such men guard the real history of their lives and the real emotions of their hearts as jealously as the combinations of their cards.  The old, ironical smile lighted up Mantel’s features, and he said: