heir chains,
giving tongue in frantic delight at the sound of his step, while the
hounds echoed the welcome from their more distant kennels, and he went
slowly across the great stone yard, with the end of a huge cheroot
glimmering through the gloom. "So he need be, to pull me through. The
Ducal and the October let me in for it enough; I never was closer in
my life. The deuce! If I don't do the distance to-morrow I shan't have
sovereigns enough to play pound-points at night! I don't know what a
man's to do; if he's put into this life, he must go the pace of it. Why
did Royal send me into the Guards, if he meant to keep the screw on in
this way? He'd better have drafted me into a marching regiment at once,
if he wanted me to live upon nothing."

Nothing meant anything under 60,000 pounds a year with Cecil, as the
minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look of genuine
annoyance and trouble, most unusual there, was on his face, the picture
of carelessness and gentle indifference habitually, though shadowed
now as he crossed the courtyard after his after-midnight visit to his
steeple-chaser. He had backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or
lose a cracker on his own riding on the morrow; and, though he had found
sufficient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough lying on
his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, to pay his groom's
book, or a notion where to get more, if the King should find his match
over the ridge and furrow in the morning!

It was not pleasant: a cynical, savage, world-disgusted Timon derives on
the whole a good amount of satisfaction from his break-down in the fine
philippics against his contemporaries that it is certain to afford, and
the magnificent grievances with which it furnishes him; but when life is
very pleasant to a man, and the world very fond of him; when existence
is perfectly smooth,--bar that single pressure of money,--and is an
incessantly changing kaleidoscope of London seasons, Paris winters,
ducal houses in the hunting months, dinners at the Pall Mall Clubs,
dinners at the Star and Garter, dinners irreproachable everywhere;
cottage for Ascot week, yachting with the R. V. Y. Club, Derby handicaps
at Hornsey, pretty chorus-singers set up in Bijou villas, dashing
rosieres taken over to Baden, warm corners in Belvoir, Savernake, and
Longeat battues, and all the rest of the general programme, with no
drawback to it, except the duties at the Palace, t