He was the only son of a Wall Street magnate who had had the misfortune to let his "transactions" get the better of him. Dirke often thought of his father when he watched the faces of the men about the "wheel." There was little in the outer aspect, even of the men of civilized traditions who stood among the gamblers, to remind him of the well-dressed, well-groomed person of his once prosperous parent. But in their faces, when the luck went against them, was a look that he was poignantly familiar with; a look which had first dawned in his father's face, flickeringly, intermittently, and which had grown and intensified, week after week, month after month, till it had gone out in the blankness of despair. That was when the elder Dirke heard his sentence of imprisonment. For Aaron Dirke's failure had involved moral as well as financial ruin. He had died of the shock, as some of his creditors thought it behooved him to do,--died in prison after one week's durance. His son envied him; but dying is difficult in early youth, and Dabney Dirke did not quite know how to set about. Sometimes when he gave the wheel the fateful turn, he tried to cheat himself with an idea that it obeyed his will, this wonderful, dizzying, maddening wheel, with its circle of helpless victims. But there were moments when he felt himself more at the mercy of the wheel than any wretched gambler of them all. As he stood, with his curiously rigid countenance, performing his monotonous functions in the peculiar silence which characterizes the group around a gaming table, he sometimes felt himself in the tangible grasp of Fate; as if the figures surrounding the table had been but pictures on his brain, and he, the puppet impersonating Fate to them, the real and only victim of chance. At such times he could get free from this imaginary bondage only by a deliberate summoning up of those facts of his previous existence which alone seemed convincingly real. They marshalled themselves readily enough at his bidding, those ruthless invaders of an easy, indolent life;--penury and disgrace, wounded pride and disappointed love, and, bringing up the rear, that firm yet futile resolve of his to go to the devil. Dabney Dirke, with his tragic intensity, had often been the occasion of humor in other men, but it is safe to say that his own mind had never been crossed by a single gleam of that illumining, revivifying flame. For that reason he took his fate and himself more seriously, Heaven help him!--than even his peculiar ill-fortune warranted. At the time of his father's failure and disgrace he had been the accepted suitor of a girl whom he idealized and adored, and in his extremity she had failed him. She had weakly done as she was bid, and broken faith with him. It was on this occasion that he laid upon himself the burdensome task of which mention has been made.