Mountjoy had told the truth when he had said that nothing was a comfort. Though it seemed to his father and to the people around him at Tretton that he had everything that a man could want, he had, in fact, nothing,--nothing to satisfy him. In the first place, he was quite alive to the misery of that decision given by the world against him, which had been of such comfort to his father. Not a club in London would admit him. He had been proclaimed a defaulter after such a fashion that all his clubs had sent to him for some explanation; and as he had given none, and had not answered their letters, his name had been crossed out in the books of them all. He knew himself to be a man disgraced, and when he had fled from London he had gone under the conviction that he would certainly never return. There were the pistol and bullet as his last assured resource; but a certain amount of good-fortune had awaited him,--enough to save him from having recourse to their aid. His brother had supplied him with small sums of money, and from time to time a morsel of good luck had enabled him to gamble, not to his heart's content, but still in some manner so as to make his life bearable. But now he was back in his own country, and he could gamble not at all, and hardly even see those old companions with whom he had lived. It was not only for the card-tables that he sighed, but for the companions of the card-table. And though he knew that he had been scratched out from the lists of all clubs as a dishonest man, he knew also, or thought that he knew, that he had been as honest as the best of those companions. As long as he could by any possibility raise money he had paid it away, and by no false trick had he ever endeavored to get it back again.