"I am unwilling to delay your supper. I am positively sure you

must be hungry. I feel that I owe you a special consideration.

And on this great day for me, when I am closing a career of folly

by my most conspicuously silly action, I wish to behave handsomely

to all who give me countenance. Gentlemen, you shall wait no

longer. Although my constitution is shattered by previous

excesses, at the risk of my life I liquidate the suspensory

condition."

With these words he crushed the nine remaining tarts into his

mouth, and swallowed them at a single movement each. Then, turning

to the commissionaires, he gave them a couple of sovereigns.

"I have to thank you," said be, "for your extraordinary patience."

And he dismissed them with a bow apiece. For some seconds he stood

looking at the purse from which he had just paid his assistants,

then, with a laugh, he tossed it into the middle of the street, and

signified his readiness for supper.

In a small French restaurant in Soho, which had enjoyed an

exaggerated reputation for some little while, but had already begun

to be forgotten, and in a private room up two pair of stairs, the

three companions made a very elegant supper, and drank three or

four bottles of champagne, talking the while upon indifferent

subjects. The young man was fluent and gay, but he laughed louder

than was natural in a person of polite breeding; his hands trembled

violently, and his voice took sudden and surprising inflections,

which seemed to be independent of his will. The dessert had been

cleared away, and all three had lighted their cigars, when the

<<BackPagesTo menuNext>>