le near lay a heap of gold and
notes. He had finished the night at his club, where lansquenet had been
raging till long after sunrise. Fortune had been more kind than usual,
and the fruits of "passing" eight times lay before me. An open
liqueur-case close at his elbow showed that play was not the only
counter-excitement to which he had resorted.

I hoped to have found him in a repentant mood, but his first words
undeceived me: "I start for Paris by this evening's train;" and then I
remarked all about me the signs of immediate departure.

I only had a confused idea of what had happened, and was anxious to know
the truth, but he was very brief in his answers: the particulars of what
had passed I learned long afterward.

"Can nothing be done?" I asked, when he had finished all he chose to
tell me.

"Nothing!" replied Livingstone, decisively. "If excuse or explanation
had been of any use, I think I should have tried them last night. You
would not advise me to humiliate myself to no purpose, I suppose?"

There is a certain scene in AEschylus which came into my mind just then.

A group of elderly men, with grave, rather vacuous faces, and grizzled
beards, stand in the court-yard of an ancient palace. On one side is the
peristyle, with its square stunted pillars, looking as if the weight
above crushed them, though it wearies them no more than the heavens do
Atlas; on the other, a gateway, vast, low-browed, shadowy with Cyclopean
stones. Somewhat apart is a strange weird figure, ever and anon starting
up and tossing her arms wildly as she utters some new denunciation, and
then cowering down again in a despairing weariness. There are traces yet
in the thin, wan face of the beauty which enslaved Loxian Apollo, and of
the pride which turned his great love into a greater hate: round it hang
the black elf-locks, disheveled, that have never been braided since the
gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely. In her great, troubled
eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming
death--death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which
the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail. No wonder that the
reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering courage enough
sometimes to answer her with a pious platitude. Alas! alas! Cassandra.

While we gaze, forth from the recesses of the gynaeceum there breaks a
cry, expressing rather wrath and surprise than mere pain. Then there
comes another, m