Temple Grace looked as if he were blighted by lightning; and his deep
blue eyes gleamed like a hyaena's. The Baron was least changed. Tom
Cogit, who smelt that the crisis was at hand, was as quiet as a bribed
rat.
On they played till six o'clock in the evening, and then they agreed
to desist till after dinner. Lord Dice threw himself on a sofa. Lord
Castlefort breathed with difficulty. The rest walked about. While they
were resting on their oars, the young Duke roughly made up his accounts.
He found that he was minus about one hundred thousand pounds.
Immense as this loss was, he was more struck, more appalled, let us say,
at the strangeness of the surrounding scene, than even by his own ruin.
As he looked upon his fellow gamesters, he seemed, for the first time in
his life, to gaze upon some of those hideous demons of whom he had read.
He looked in the mirror at himself. A blight seemed to have fallen
over his beauty, and his presence seemed accursed. He had pursued a
dissipated, even more than a dissipated career. Many were the nights
that had been spent by him not on his couch; great had been the
exhaustion that he had often experienced; haggard had sometimes even
been the lustre of his youth.
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