.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said George.

"I suppose not," said Perry; "they go so well together. I hope it isn't,
at any rate: I like to do things that are bad form."

So I relapsed into silence, and my speculations about George's outbreak
against gambling, and Mrs. Herbert's beautiful face and sad eyes, and
Lucretia Knowles's wicked light-heartedness.

When we had finished eating and had opened the last bottle of beer, I
asked George, as he stopped his talk with Perry for a moment to relight
his cigar, who Mrs. Herbert was.

"She is the noblest and most unfortunate woman in the world," he
replied, "I will tell you her story some time, perhaps."

"Let us hear it now," I cried, looking at Perry with triumph.

"Yes, let us," said Perry, nothing to my surprise, for I knew his heart
was in the right place, if his ways were a little rough and
unimpressionable-like. "We have no recitations, no lectures, no
anything, to-morrow, and there is no one else in the restaurant but the
waiter, and he is asleep."

And, in fact, we could hear him snoring.

"No, I would rather not tell it here," George said simply; "but if you
will come with me to the office you shall hear it." And when we had
heard it we respected the feeling that had prompted him to consider even
the walls of such a place as unfit listeners. To be sure, it was a very
comfortable restaurant, where the waiters were always attentive and
skilful and the mutton-chops irreproachable, and many a pleasant evening
had we three had there over our cigars and Milwaukee, and sometimes a
bottle or two of claret. But so had Tom Hagard, the faro-dealer, and
Frank Sauter, who played poker over Sudden's, and Dick Bander, who got
his money from Madame Blank because he happened to be a swashing
slugger, and many another Tom, Dick, and Harry whose reputations were,
to say the least, questionable. Of course we never associated with such
characters, and plenty of estimable people besides ourselves frequented
Bertrand's. The place was not in bad odor at all, but merely a little
miscellaneous, and suited our plebeian fancies all the more on that
account. If young fellows want to be really comfortable in life, we
thought, and see a little at first hand just what sort of people make up
the world, they must not be too particular. So we used to sit down at
the next table to one where a gambler or a horse-jockey would perhaps be
seated, or a man of worse fame, and order our humble repas