Mrs. Catherine became more cheerful at last, before the kind-hearted Portoran writer took his departure, and admitted the chances in favor of his hopes. Archibald _had_ been shrewd and sensible, and could not surely be so ruinously involved as to put his whole estate in peril; nevertheless, dreary visions, such as he had read in books of modern travel, of haggard gamesters risking their all upon a cast--staking wealth, and hope, and honor, in the desperate game, and marking its loss with the ghastly memento of blood, the hopeless death of the suicide--rose darkly before the lawyer's eyes, as he rode home--home, to pleasant competence and unobtrusive refinement, and to a family of sound principle and cultivated intellect, in whose healthful upbringing and clear atmosphere fictitious excitement had no share. And Mrs. Catherine went up stairs, gravely, to her cheerful inner drawing-room, and looking on the youthful faces there--the peaceful household looks, suggesting anything rather than misery and crime--forgot her terrors for Isabel Balfour's son, warm as her interest in him was. Haggard, desolate, hopeless, with no roof which he could justly call his own to shelter him, and with a dreary blank before him, where the teeming dreams of a bright future were wont to be, Archibald Sutherland stood that night, in the strange alien country, a ruined man. CHAPTER VI. Tiresome as the manifold preparations for a feast may be, there is something especially dreary and full of discomfort in the bustle of setting to rights, which comes after: dismantled rooms undergoing a thorough purification, before they can once more settle down into their every day look and aspect; servants, in a chaos and frenzy of orderliness, turning the house into a Babel--a kitchen saturnalia; mistresses toiling in vain to have the work concluded bit by bit; and all this without the stimulant of expected pleasure to make it bearable. Mrs. Ross rather liked such an overturn, and had it commenced gaily in the first relief of Mr. Ambler's departure; so that when Lewis and Anne returned from the Tower, there was no place of refuge for them, save in the small library, which Lewis had already appropriated as his own peculiar place of retirement.