ken Bernard's fifty pounds into the Kursaal
and left them there. Bernard, on learning his misfortune, lent him
another fifty, with which he performed a second series of unsuccessful
experiments; and our hero was not at his ease until he had passed over
to his luckless friend the whole amount of his own winnings, every penny
of which found its way through Captain Lovelock's fingers back into the
bank. When this operation was completed, Bernard left Baden, the Captain
gloomily accompanying him to the station.

I have said that there had come over Bernard a singular sense of
freedom. One of the uses he made of his freedom was to undertake a long
journey. He went to the East and remained absent from Europe for upward
of two years--a period of his life of which it is not proposed to
offer a complete history. The East is a wonderful region, and Bernard,
investigating the mysteries of Asia, saw a great many curious and
beautiful things. He had moments of keen enjoyment; he laid up a great
store of impressions and even a considerable sum of knowledge. But,
nevertheless, he was not destined to look back upon this episode with
any particular complacency. It was less delightful than it was supposed
to be; it was less successful than it might have been. By what unnatural
element the cup of pleasure was adulterated, he would have been very
much at a loss to say; but it was an incontestable fact that at times he
sipped it as a medicine, rather than quaffed it as a nectar. When people
congratulated him on his opportunity of seeing the world, and said they
envied him the privilege of seeing it so well, he felt even more than
the usual degree of irritation produced by an insinuation that fortune
thinks so poorly of us as to give us easy terms. Misplaced sympathy is
the least available of superfluities, and Bernard at this time found
himself thinking that there was a good deal of impertinence in the
world. He would, however, readily have confessed that, in so far as he
failed to enjoy his Oriental wanderings, the fault was his own; though
he would have made mentally the gratifying reflection that never was
a fault less deliberate. If, during the period of which I speak, his
natural gayety had sunk to a minor key, a partial explanation may
be found in the fact that he was deprived of the society of his late
companion. It was an odd circumstance that the two young men had not met
since Gordon's abrupt departure from Baden. Gordon went to Be