'There are reasons, quite honourable I need not tell you, which make it necessary, James Dutton, that the whole of this affair should be kept perfectly to ourselves; you are not to repeat one syllable I say to you to your mother, do you mind, or to any other person living. The gentleman is liberal, and if you can just hold your tongue, you will have little trouble in satisfying him upon all other points. But if you can't be quite silent, you had better, I frankly tell you, decline the situation, excellent in all respects as it is.' 'I'm a man, Sir, as can be close enough.' 'So much the better. You don't drink?' Dutton coloured a little and coughed and said-- 'No, Sir.' 'You have your papers?' 'Yes, Sir.' 'We must be satisfied as to your sobriety, Dutton. Come back at half-past eleven and I'll see you, and bring your papers; and, do you see, you are not to talk, you understand; only you may say, if anyone presses, that I am thinking of hiring you to attend on a gentleman, whose name you don't yet know, who's going to travel. That's all.' So Jim Dutton made his bow, and departed; and Captain Lake continued to watch the door for some seconds after his departure, as if he could see his retreating figure through it. And, said he, with an oath, and his hand to his forehead, over his eyebrow-- 'It _is_ the most unaccountable thing in nature!' Then, after a reverie of some seconds, the young gentleman applied himself energetically to his toilet; and coming down to his sitting-room, he looked into his morning paper, and then into the street, and told the servant as he sate down to breakfast, that he expected a gentleman named Wylder to call that morning, and to be sure to show him up directly. Captain Lake's few hours' sleep, contrary to popular ideas about gamesters' slumbers, had been the soundest and the most natural which he had enjoyed for a good many nights. He was refreshed. At Gylingden and Brandon he had been simulating Captain Stanley Lake--being, in truth, something quite different--with a vigilant histrionic effort which was awfully exhausting, and sometimes nearly intolerable. Here the captain was perceptibly stealing into his old ways and feelings. His spirit revived; something like confidence in the future, and a possibility even of enjoying the present, was struggling visibly through the cold fog that environed him. Reason has, after all, so little to do with our moods. The weather, the scene, the stomach, how pleasantly they deal with facts--how they supersede philosophy, and even arithmetic, and teach us how much of life is intoxication and illusion.