e turning the unconscious Star and Garter unto an
impromptu Crockford's over their wine.

Little Berk's pretty face was very flushed; his lips were set tight, his
eyes were glittering; the boy had the gambler's passion of the Royallieu
blood in its hottest intensity. He was playing with a terrible eagerness
that went to Bertie's heart with the same sort of pang of remorse with
which he had looked on him when he had been thrown like dead on his bed
at home.

Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window.

"Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are going home; will
you come?" he asked, with a careless nod to the rest of the young
fellows.

Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance.

"No, I can't," he said irritably; "don't you see we are playing,
Bertie?"

"I see," answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of sadness in
him, as he leaned farther over the windowsill with his cigar in his
teeth.

"Come away," he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the boy, who
chanced to be close to the casement. "Hazard is the very deuce for
anybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come with us, Berk; there's a
capital set here, and I'm going to half a dozen good houses to-night,
when we get back. I'll take you with me. Come! you like waltzing, and
all that sort of thing, you know."

The lad shook himself peevishly; a sullen cloud over his fair,
picturesque, boyish face.

"Let me alone before the fellows," he muttered impatiently. "I won't
come, I tell you."

"Soit!"

Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the Lelas'
cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without any more
expostulation. The sweetness of his temper could never be annoyed, but
also he never troubled himself to utter useless words. Moreover, he had
never been in is life much in earnest about anything; it was not worth
while.

"A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sins enough on
my own shoulders for twenty," he thought; as he shook the ribbons and
started the leaders off to the gay music of Laura Lelas' champagne-tuned
laughter.

The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his
brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt
something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer
dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with
the premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous,
half-querulous lamentations over hi