"A bottle of champagne is no more to me than a drop of dew to a sylph: there is nothing earthy about it. Look at Lady Polwhele devouring turkey and ham with the appetite of a chairman, and yet after supper she will be as _évaporée_ as you please--a bundle of nerves and emotions. Hark!" It was the eight-day clock in the hall striking the hour. Lavendale had made no comment upon the passage of time hitherto, and all his friends were inwardly chuckling over the trick that had been played him, which had been explained to them as a wager of Bolingbroke's. Could his lordship cheat his host out of an hour before the end of the year, he was to win a hundred guineas. This time Lavendale stopped talking, listened intently, and counted every stroke. "Eleven!" he exclaimed; "how late we are supping!" "We sat so long at that devilish game," said Judith, who had been a heavy loser. "Well, I must resign myself to be unlucky at cards, if 'tis but at that price one can be fortunate in love." To her, in a quarter of an hour's confidential talk after dinner, Herrick had told much more of the truth than had been imparted to Lavendale's other guests. He had implored her to do her utmost to distract her lover, to prevent his thinking his own thoughts, were it possible; to absorb him, interest him, bewitch him, as only she could. "Alas, I fear all my weapons are stale, my armoury is used up," she said, with a sigh; "we have been so deep in love with each other, so frank in our love-making for this last happy week, that I have no treasures of tenderness, no refinement of coquetry in reserve. Like Juliet, I have been too lightly won, too frank--I have too openly adored. O Durnford, if I am to lose him at last, I shall go stark mad!" "You will not lose him, if you can beguile him to forget his waking dream." "Was it a dream? Was it not the presage of death, rather a physical influence, the poor decaying body conscious of the coming change? He had a look of death this morning. There was an ashy grayness upon his face that horrified me. Yes, I was racked with despair in the midst of our talk of future happiness. And now you bid me be gay, when my heart sinks within me every time I look at him."