’But I am not Abrane, I’m not Abrane!  I never play, I have no mania, none.  It would be prudent, Fleetwood.’

’The slightest bulging of a pocket would show on you, Corby; and they would be at you, they would fall on you and pluck you to have another fling.  I ’d rather my money should go to a knight of the road than feed that dragon’s jaw.  A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with your honourable corporation of fly-catchers.  I could surrender to him with some satisfaction after a trial of the better man.  I ’ve tried these tables, and couldn’t stir a pulse.  Have you?’

It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables.  ‘Not I,’ said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.

Lord Fleetwood studied him half a minute, as if measuring and discarding a suspicion of the young philosopher’s possible weakness under temptation.

Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the town and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of quieting his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together.  He could not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands.  He said it:—­he could not have done the thing.  So the best he could do was to let them go.  Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect of striking contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in Great Britain tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his comrade, a total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly next to a mendicant, charged him with quantities of interjectory matter, that he caught himself firing to the foreign people on the highway.  Hundreds of thousands a year, and tramping it like a pedlar, with a beggar for his friend!  He would have given something to have an English ear near him as he watched them rounding under the mountain they were about to climb.

CHAPTER IX

Concerning the black goddess fortune and the worship of her, together with an introduction of some of her VOTARIES

In those early days of Fortune’s pregnant alternations of colour between the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly, as it were a petroleum spring of the ebony-fiery lake below, Black-Forest Baden was the sprightliest’ of the ante-chambers of Hades.  Thither in the ripeness of the year trooped the devotees of the sable goddess to perform sacrifice; and annually among them the beautiful Livia, the Countess of Fleetwood; for nowhere else had she sensation of the perfect repose which is rocked to a slumber by gales.