“No.”

“So far well,” he added, taking a long pull with his lungs, as if he had got quit of an attack of asthma; “but though I may satisfy the widow, how am I to appease Heaven?  Come,” he added, again seizing me with a force in which there was a tremble, “I want to ease my mind.  You are my oldest friend, and a load divided is more easily carried.”

And leading the way into the parlour, where the fire had got into a fine red heat, and was sending a glare through the ruby and golden contents of several strangely-shaped bottles on the table, he threw himself on a chair on the one side, I taking one on the other.  A few minutes of silence intervened.

“If it be as painful for you,” he continued, “to hear a confession as it is for me to make it, you may help yourself to bear the infliction by pouring into your stomach some of that Burgundy.  I will take none.  I have fire enough in my brain already;” and he pushed the bottle to me.

“You were a bit of a blackleg yourself,” he continued, as he threw himself back in the arm-chair, and compressed his chest with his folded arms till the blood seemed to mount to his face.  “You were present at that game where I took the five thousand by a trick from Gourlay.  You know, as a gambler yourself, that all the tribe are by constitution cheats.  It is folly to speak of an honest gambler.  The passion is a ten thousand times distilled selfishness, with no qualm of obligation to God or religion to keep it in check—­only a little fear of that bugbear, society.  Our club at the ‘Red Lion’ all knew this in our souls; but every one of us knew also that the moment he would be discovered cheating, he would be scorched with our hatred and contempt.  He must leave our pure society on the instant—­not of course that he was any worse than the rest of us, but only that he was unfortunate in being discovered.  That night Gourlay and I were demons.  We had baffled each other, and drank till our brains seethed, though our countenances and speech betrayed nothing but the extreme of coolness.  He had won a thousand of me, and hounded me from post to pillar, offering to be cleared out by my skill, as he called it sneeringly.  The fellow, in short, hated me, because the year before, at Baden-Baden, I had taken two thousand out of him, and would not give him his revenge.”

“He must have thought you honest,” said I; “otherwise he would not have thus badgered you to play.”

“No; he had not the generosity to think me honest.  I repeat, no gambler ever thinks another gambler honest, and he lies when he says so.  He knew himself to be a rogue, and thought it diamond in the teeth of diamond;” and, pausing and meditating, he repeated the word, “diamond—­diamond—­diamond.”

I looked at him in surprise.  He continued to keep up the cuckoo sound, trying to laugh, and yet totally unable to accomplish even a cackle, as if some internal force clutched the diaphragm and mocked him, so that his efforts were reduced to a gurgling as in cynanche—­like a dog choking with a rope round his craig, the sounds coming jerking out in barks, and dying away again in yelps and whines.