uld have
no power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a few
months, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness and darkness lay
beyond.

Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that seemed to him
endurable or worth the living; severed from all the pleasures, pursuits,
habits, and luxuries of long custom; deprived of all that had become to
him as second nature from childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out from
all that he had known as the very necessities of existence; his very
name forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a man
without a career, without a hope, without a refuge--he could not realize
that this was what awaited him then; this was the fate that must within
so short a space be his. Life had gone so smoothly with him, and his
world was a world from whose surface every distasteful thought was so
habitually excluded, that he could no more understand this desolation
lying in wait for him than one in the fullness and elasticity of health
can believe the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before the sun
has set.

As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches glancing on the
gold and silver hilts of the crossed swords above the fireplace, and the
smoke of his cheroot curling among the pile of invitation cards to all
the best houses in town, Cecil could not bring himself to believe that
things were really come to this pass with him. It is so hard for a man
who has the magnificence of the fashionable clubs open to him day and
night to beat into his brain the truth that in six months hence he may
be lying in the debtors' prison at Baden; it is so difficult for a man
who has had no greater care on his mind than to plan the courtesies of a
Guards' Ball or of a yacht's summer-day banquet, to absolutely conceive
the fact that in a year's time he will thank God if he have a few francs
left to pay for a wretched dinner in a miserable estaminet in a foreign
bathing-place.

"It mayn't come to that," he thought; "something may happen. If I could
get my troop now, that would stave off the Jews; or, if I should win
some heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, things would swim on again. I must
win; the King will be as fit as in the Shires, and there will only be
the French horses between us and an absolute 'walk over.' Things mayn't
come to the worst, after all."

And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, was his
temperament, that he read himself