"If I should ever ask your advice, it will be upon other things. I'm giving the lender as good security as I have given to any one else. I don't see any great wonder in the matter. Good-night," he said haughtily, not taking the trouble to look over his shoulder as he walked away. "Good-night," responded Mr. Levi, taking one of Dignum's cigars from his waistcoat-pocket, and preparing to light it with a lazy grin, as he watched the retreating figure lessening in the perspective of the street, "and take care of yourshelf for my shake, _do_, and don't you be lettin' all them fine women be throwin' their fortunes like that into your 'at, and bringin' themshelves to the workus, for love of your pretty fashe--poor, dear, love-sick little fools! There you go, right off to Mallet and Turner's, I dareshay, and good luck attend you, for a reglar lady-killin', 'ansome, sweet-spoken, broken-down jackass!" At this period of his valediction the vesuvian was applied to his cigar, and Richard Arden, turning the far corner of the street, escaped the remainder of his irony, as the Jew, with his hands in his pockets, sauntered up its quiet pavement, in the direction in which Richard Arden had just disappeared. It seemed to that young gentleman that his supplies, no less than thirteen hundred pounds, would all but command the luck of which, as his spirits rose, he began to feel confident. "Fellows," he thought, "who have gone in with less than fifty, have come out, to my knowledge, with thousands; and if less than fifty could do that, what might not be expected from thirteen hundred?" He picked up a cab. Never did lover fly more impatiently to the feet of his mistress than Richard Arden did, that night, to the shrine of the goddess whom he worshipped. The muttered scoffs, the dark fiery gaze, the glimmering teeth of this mocking, malicious little Jew, represented an influence that followed Richard Arden that night. CHAPTER XLVIII. SUDDEN NEWS. What is luck? Is there such an influence? What type of mind rejects altogether, and consistently, this law or power? Call it by what name you will, fate or fortune, did not Napoleon, the man of death and of action, and did not Swedenborg, the man of quietude and visions, acknowledge it? Where is the successful gamester who does not "back his luck," when once it has declared itself, and bow before the storms of fortune when they in turn have set in? I take Napoleon and Swedenborg--the man of this visible world, and the man of the invisible world--as the representatives of extreme types of mind. People who have looked into Swedenborg's works will remember curious passages on the subject, and find more dogmatical, and less metaphysical admissions in Napoleon's conversations everywhere. In corroboration of this theory, that luck is an element, with its floods and ebbs, against which it is fatuity to contend, was the result of Richard Arden's play.