Carew, who had been as one bewildered and suddenly awakened out of a dream with the terror of it still upon him, drew a chair to the table and caught up the dice-box with a trembling hand. As his fingers closed upon the box, his face grew deadly pale; his heart stood still in his breast in an overmastering agony of fear and hope and hate. To him this meant everything in the world. The man opposite to him had stripped him naked--the man whose smile stabbed him like a knife, and whom he hated with a bitterness of hatred that he had no language to measure. Should he retrieve his fortune, and on how little that depended, not all the powers on earth would again tempt him to such unspeakable folly. A mere gull who had flung away his inheritance before he had possessed it! The happy chance of redemption had come to him unexpectedly. What had moved De Laprade to make this strange and curious proposal, he did not stop to ask, he did not care to know. It was enough for him that it had been made. He knew that he could exert no influence on his sister´s mind; that his intercession would rather injure than advance the cause he advocated. That was the Vicomte´s business. He was a gambler and accustomed to take the chances, and it was he who had proposed the stakes. He passed his hand across his eyes to clear away the mists; the room seemed full of moving haze through which the candles burned with a feeble and uncertain light. He drew a deep breath. The first throw Carew won; the second fell to the Vicomte. Then there happened a curious thing--when Carew was about to throw for the third time, the Vicomte stooped down to lift his handkerchief from the floor where it had fallen a moment before. While he did this somewhat clumsily for one in general so dexterous, the dice rattled on the table. Making a slight motion with his fingers Carew, hardly pausing, cried “Sixes.” The Vicomte slowly raised his head. “Your play improves, sir,” he said drily; “that was a lucky throw. Come, sir, you are not yet out of the wood, and perhaps I shall yet see you through.” Then he threw himself. “By all the saints, the Venus! This grows interesting. We must have one more cast for fortune.” “The devil´s in them,” cries Carew, his eyes fairly aglow and his lips twitching like one in a fit. This time the Vicomte won. “I knew how it would be,” he said, with an air of pensive sadness; “I have no luck, I can do no more.” Carew laughed loudly, almost as if this last stroke had touched his brain. “Luck, what more would you have? Here have I been sitting for three weeks while you plucked me like a hen feather by feather, with a smile on your face, and I know not what devil´s craft in your fingers.” “These are foolish words, sir, for which I will not ask you to account. To talk of craft comes but ill from one who himself----” Here he stopped and looked at Carew steadily. “God knows I am but a pitiful fellow myself, and yet I would I had never seen your face.”