“You must have been doing something devilish bad, Lisgard,” observed the Guardsman. “Yes, I have--playing!” answered Walter bitterly. “But no fellow _can_ play with sixes and sevens; it demoralises one so.” “All cards do, my grandmother says,” answered Wobegon, who for a Guardsman was not without humour. “She made me promise, when she paid my debts, my first Derby, that I would never back anything again; and I never have, except my luck and bills.” Captain Lisgard had naturally a keen appreciation of fun, but he did not vouchsafe a smile to the facetious Guardsman, who himself joked like an undertaker, and had never been known to laugh in his life. The fact was, that nothing could just now commend itself to Master Walter except winning back his money. Reader, did you ever play for more than you can afford? Pardon me the inquiry; there is no occasion to be Pharisaical; for it is even possible to do worse things than that in your line: moreover, the question of what is more than you can afford is such a large one, and affords such opportunities for a nimble conscience to escape. I remember in Lord Houghton's _Life of Keats_, that that gallant nobleman, in defending the poet from the charge of dissipation and gambling, remarks that it all arose from his having lost ten pounds upon a certain evening at cards. How, considering that the author of _Hyperion_ had no income, nor any bank except his Imagination to apply to--and it was notorious that he could never put a cheque even upon _that_--I take his Lordship to be a very charitable peer. Ten pounds must have been, for Keats, a large sum. But, undoubtedly, the matter is one for a man to decide for himself; the whole question is relative; and if you are apt to lose your temper, then remember you play for more than you can afford, although your stakes are but--penny-stamps. Captain Walter Lisgard had lost his temper and his money also. There was a numbed sense of misfortune pervading him; it seemed to him as though he was Predestinated to lose. I am much mistaken if he had not a sort of humming in his ears. One of the most religious men whom it has been my fortune to meet, has informed me that, in his unregenerate days, when he was a gambler and everything else, * he once _prayed to win_ at cards.---- * “Every sin, sir, in the Decalogue, I am glad to say, have I committed”--meaning that the present change in him was rendered thereby all the more satisfactory--“with the sole exception of murder.” “Then it strikes me.” said I, “in addition to your other backslidings at the time you speak of, you were just a trifle blasphemous.”