chance, he is now an habitue.  To-night he left his suffering family, lost his all here, and now, having drank to relieve his feelings, lies insensible on the floor.  “Come home!—­come home! for God’s sake come home to your suffering family,” cries the woman, vaulting to him and taking him by the hand, her hair floating dishevelled down her shoulders.  “I sent Tommy into the street to beg-I am ashamed-and he is picked up by the watch for a thief, a vagrant!” The prostrate man remains insensible to her appeal.  Two policemen, who have been quietly neglecting their duties while taking a few chances, sit unmoved.  Mr. Snivel thinks the woman better be removed.  “Our half-starved mechanics,” he says, “are a depraved set; and these wives they bring with them from the North are a sort of cross between a lean stage-driver and a wildcat.  She seems a poor, destitute creature-just what they all come to, out here.”  Mr. Snivel shrugs his shoulders, bids George good night, and takes his departure.  “Take care of yourself, George,” he says admonitiously, as the destitute man watches him take his leave.  The woman, frantic at the coldness and apathy manifested for her distress, lays her babe hurriedly upon the floor, and with passion and despair darting from her very eyes, makes a lunge across the keno table at the man who sits stoically at the bank.  In an instant everything is turned into uproar and confusion.  Glasses, chairs, and tables, are hurled about the floor; shriek follows shriek—­“help! pity me! murder!” rises above the confusion, the watch without sound the alarm, and the watch within suddenly become conscious of their duty.  In the midst of all the confusion, a voice cries out:  “My pocket book-my pocket book!—­I have been robbed.”  A light flashes from a guardsman’s lantern, and George Mullholland is discovered with the forlorn woman in his arms-she clings tenaciously to her babe-rushing into the street.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Which A state of society is slightly revealed.

A week has rolled into the past since the event at the Keno den.

Madame Montford, pale, thoughtful, and abstracted, sits musing in her parlor.  “Between this hope and fear-this remorse of conscience, this struggle to overcome the suspicions of society, I have no peace.  I am weary of this slandering-this unforgiving world.  And yet it is my own conscience that refuses to forgive me.  Go where I will I see the cold finger of scorn pointed at me:  I read in every countenance, ’Madame Montford, you have wronged some one-your guilty conscience betrays you!’ I have sought to atone for my error-to render justice to one my heart tells me I have wronged, yet I cannot shake off the dread burden; and there seems rest for me only in the grave.  Ah! there it is.  The one error of my life, and the means used to conceal it, may have brought misery upon more heads than one.”