rty supplied
the zest of variety, while the tales of a clever _raconteur_ produced
peals of merry laughter and called forth the utmost efforts of the staid
French waiters to preserve their habitual immobility of countenance.

When the dinner was over and the party had removed to the veranda for
coffee and cigars, each person there had forgotten, for the moment, all
the cares of life, and was lost in the delightful joy of living.
Exception must, however, be made of Marion, for, although the society of
others usually enabled her to cast aside the depressing influences which
often afflicted her, on this occasion she was unusually silent, and had
been quite unresponsive to the loquacious efforts exerted by the grain
broker on her right to arouse her interest. She now sat a little removed
from the rest and gazed moodily out over the deserted race-course,
thinking over the events of the past few months, and wondering, in a
dazed sort of way, what the outcome would be. The men had gathered
together and were discussing sport, while the women talked animatedly
about a certain Mrs. Johnson whose actions had lately been disapproved
of in certain quarters, so Marion was permitted to follow the current of
her fancies undisturbed.

It was just dark enough for the freshly lighted cigars to glow in the
fading light. With the setting of the sun had come the silence evening
casts over a busy city, and except the occasional croaking of a frog in
the Club House lake, or the distant whistle of a locomotive, there was
no sound to break the evening quiet. Away over by the long row of
red-roofed stables a pair of work-horses were slowly dragging a harrow
over the deserted race-course, and they and the laborer trudging behind
them were the only evidences of life which Marion could see. The last
sun-gleam left the sky, but a fading tinge of light still rested upon
the clouds. Marion watched it for a moment,--then it was gone. It seemed
to her like a life which fades slowly into oblivion. She often thought
of the unseen, and tried, occasionally, to form some life theory which
seemed rational. To-night, in the stillness which came after the bustle
of the day, she felt singularly alone. She looked up into the
impenetrable darkness and to her fancy the world seemed a frightful pit
of blackness with a mass of living creatures at the bottom,--writhing in
misery and gasping for a breath of happiness. And God? An awful monster
at the pit's mouth, baiti