"And from his lips those words of insult fell-- His sword is good who can maintain them well."
It was the middle of October; the reflux of the winter season was beginning to fill Paris, and thither Mohun and Livingstone had returned from their German tour, the latter decidedly the worse for his wanderings. He had not suffered much physically, for the hard living that would have utterly broken up some constitutions had only been able to make his face thinner, to deepen the bistre tints under the eyes, and to give a more angular gauntness to his massive frame.
But morally he was not the same man. Play, which had formerly been only an occasional excitement, had now become a necessary part of his daily existence. Mohun would never say--perhaps he did not know--how much Guy had lost during those few months. In spite of several gigantic _coups_ (he broke the bank both at Baden and Hombourg), the balance was fearfully on the wrong side, so much so that it entailed a heavy mortgage--the maiden one in his time--on the fair lands of Kerton Manor.
I wonder people have not got tired of quoting "_Heureux en jeu; malheureux en amour_." It seems one of the least true of all stale, stupid proverbs. Luck will run itself out in more ways than one; and sometimes you will never hold a trump, however often the suit changes. The ancients knew better than we when they called the double-sixes "Venus's cast." The monotony of Guy's reckless dissipations was soon broken up by an event which ought to have sobered him.
He had been dining with Mohun at the Trois Frères, and they were returning late toward the Boulevards, when their attention was attracted by a group in one of the narrow streets leading out of the Rue Vivienne. Five or six raffish-looking men had surrounded a fair, delicate girl, and were preparing to besiege her in form, deriving apparently intense amusement from the piteous entreaties of their victim to be released. Not the _roués_ of the Regency after the suppers that have become a by-word--not the _mousquetaires_ after the wildest of their orgies--were ever so unrelenting in brutality toward women quite lonely and undefended as those unshorn ornaments of Young France, when replete with a dinner at forty _sous_, and with the anomalous liquor that Macon blushes to own.