St. Levant was ruined horse-and-foot, without power or hope of redemption: that one bet would have pulled him through. Some pleasanter engagement had kept Wyverne away from The Corner on the "comparing day," and with his usual carelessness he had even omitted to send his book down by other hands: Hercules saw a last desperate chance, and grasped at it, as drowning men will do. He appeared at the settling with his well-known betting book (gorgeous, like all his other belongings, in green morocco and gold,) but Hecuba's name was replaced by the second favourite's. He chanced to have in his possession a fac-simile of the original volume, and had copied out, in the interim, every bet it contained, with this one trifling alteration. The matter came before the authorities, of course. The discussion that ensued, though stormy (on one side) was very short and decisive: the swindler's foamy asseverations were shivered, like spray, on the granite of the other's calm, contemptuous firmness. The judges did not hesitate long in pronouncing against St. Levant their sentence of perpetual banishment. All his piteous petitions addressed to Wyverne in after days to induce the latter to obtain a mitigation of his punishment, remained absolutely unanswered. There still survives--a pale, blurred shadow of his former self--as it were, the _wraith_ of the Great Captain. We see occasionally a hirsute head rising above the sea of villanous figures and faces that seethe and surge against the rails of the enclosure: we catch glimpses of a meteoric waistcoat flashing through the surrounding seediness; and we hear a voice, thunderous as that of the elder Ajax, dominating the din of the meaner _mêlée_; but there is no reversal of his doom. The poor lost spirit must ramp and roar among the "welshers" of the outer darkness, for the paradise of the Ring is closed to him for evermore.