right to be a poor man. But a man will be poor
who does such mad things as I do. I had three or four thousand pounds
clear, and I spent every shilling of it on the Chelsea election.
Goodness knows whether I shall have a shilling at all when another
chance comes round; but if I have I shall certainly spend it, and
if I have not, I shall go in debt wherever I can raise a hundred
pounds."

"I hope you will be successful at last."

"I feel sure that I shall. But, in the mean time, I cannot but know
that my career is perfectly reckless. No woman ought to join her lot
to mine unless she has within her courage to be as reckless as I am.
You know what men do when they toss up for shillings?"

"Yes, I suppose I do."

"I am tossing up every day of my life for every shilling that I
have."

"Do you mean that you're--gambling?"

"No. I have given that up altogether. I used to gamble, but I never
do that now, and never shall again. What I mean is this,--that I hold
myself in readiness to risk everything at any moment, in order to
gain any object that may serve my turn. I am always ready to lead a
forlorn hope. That's what I mean by tossing up every day for every
shilling that I have."

Alice did not quite understand him, and perhaps he did not intend
that she should. Perhaps his object was to mystify her imagination.
She did not understand him, but I fear that she admired the kind of
courage which he professed. And he had not only professed it: in that
matter of the past election he had certainly practised it.

In talking of beauty to his sister he had spoken of himself as being
ugly. He would not generally have been called ugly by women, had not
one side of his face been dreadfully scarred by a cicatrice, which in
healing, had left a dark indented line down from his left eye to his
lower jaw. That black ravine running through his cheek was certainly
ugly. On some occasions, when he was angry or disappointed, it was
very hideous; for he would so contort his face that the scar would,
as it were, stretch itself out, revealing all its horrors, and his
countenance would become all scar. "He looked at me like the devil
himself--making the hole in his face gape at me," the old squire
had said to John Vavasor in describing the interview in which the
grandson had tried to bully his grandfather into assenting to his own
views about the mortgage. But in other respects George's face was not
ugly, and might have been thought handsome