“Go on, go on; believe me, I am deeply interested.”

“I can see as much.  We were not nice in the various schemes which our prolific fancies engendered.  If trickery, and the false dice at the gaming-table, sufficed not to fill our purses, we were bold enough for violence.  If simple robbery would not succeed, we could take a life.”

“Murder?”

“Ay, call it by its proper name, a murder.  We sat till the midnight hour had passed, without arriving at a definite conclusion; we saw no plan of practicable operation, and so we wandered onwards to one of those deep dens of iniquity, a gaming-house, wherein we had won and lost thousands.

“We had no money, but we staked largely, in the shape of a wager, upon the success of one of the players; we knew not, or cared not, for the consequence, if we had lost; but, as it happened, we were largely successful, and beggars as we had walked into that place, we might have left it independent men.

“But when does the gambler know when to pause in his career?  If defeat awakens all the raging passions of humanity within his bosom, success but feeds the great vice that has been there engendered.  To the dawn of morn we played; the bright sun shone in, and yet we played—­the midday came, and went—­the stimulant of wine supported us, and still we played; then came the shadows of evening, stealing on in all their beauty.  But what were they to us, amid those mutations of fortune, which, at one moment, made us princes, and placed palaces at our control, and, at another, debased us below the veriest beggar, that craves the stinted alms of charity from door to door.

“And there was one man who, from the first to the last, stayed by us like a very fiend; more than man, I thought he was not human.  We won of all, but of him.  People came and brought their bright red gold, and laid it down before us, but for us to take it up, and then, by a cruel stroke of fortune, he took it from us.

“The night came on; we won, and he won of us; the clock struck twelve—­we were beggars.  God knows what was he.

“We saw him place his winnings about his person—­we saw the smile that curved the corners of his lips; he was calm, and we were maddened.  The blood flowed temperately through his veins, but in ours it was burning lava, scorching as it went through every petty artery, and drying up all human thought—­all human feeling.

“The winner left, and we tracked his footsteps.  When he reached the open air, although he had taken much less than we of the intoxicating beverages that are supplied gratis to those who frequent those haunts of infamy, it was evident that some sort of inebriation attacked him; his steps were disordered and unsteady, and, as we followed him, we could perceive, by the devious track that he took, that he was somewhat uncertain of his route.

“We had no fixed motive in so pursuing this man.  It was but an impulsive proceeding at the best; but as he still went on and cleared the streets, getting into the wild and open country, and among the hedge-rows, we began to whisper together, and to think that what we did not owe to fortune, we might to our own energy and courage at such a moment.