That morning Richard Arden looked as if he had got up after a month's fever. His dinner had been a pretence, and his breakfast was a sham. His luck, as he termed it, had got him at last pretty well into a corner. The placing of the horses was a dreadful record of moral impossibilities accomplished against him. Five minutes before the start he could have sold his book for three thousand pounds; five minutes after it no one would have accepted fifteen thousand to take it off his hands. The shock, at first a confusion, had grown in the night into ghastly order. It was all, in the terms of the good old simile, "as plain as a pike-staff." He simply could not pay. He might sell everything he possessed, and pay about ten shillings in the pound, and then work his passage to another country, and become an Australian drayman, or a New Orleans billiard-marker. But not pay his bets! And how could he? Ten shillings in the pound? Not five. He forgot how far he was already involved. What _was_ to become of him. Breakfast he could eat none. He drank a cup of tea, but his tremors grew worse. He tried claret, but that, too, was chilly comfort. He was driven to an experiment he had never ventured before. He had a "nip," and another, and with this Dutch courage rallied a little, and was able to talk to his friend and admirer, Vandeleur, who had made a miniature book after the pattern of Dick Arden's and had lost some hundreds, which he did not know how to pay; and who was, in his degree, as miserable as his chief; for is it not established that-- "The poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great As when a giant dies"? Young Vandeleur, with light silken hair, and innocent blue eyes, found his paragon the picture of "grim-visaged, comfortless despair," drumming a tattoo on the window, in slippers and dressing-gown, without a collar to his shirt. "You lost, of course," said Richard savagely; "you followed my lead. Any fellow that does is sure to lose." "Yes," answered Vandeleur, "I did, heavily; and, I give you my honour, I believe I'm ruined." "How much?" "Two hundred and forty pounds!" "_Ruined!_ What nonsense! Who are you? or what the devil are you making such a row about? Two hundred and forty! How can you be such an ass? Don't you know it's nothing?"