Lionel was not anxious to get away with the money he had won. It was he
who proposed to increase the stakes to L10 from each player--which the
rest of them, to their credit be it said, refused to do. In the end,
when they went to get their hats and coats before issuing into the
morning air, some one happened to ask Lionel how he had come off on the
whole night; and he replied that he did not think he had either won or
lost anything to speak of. He hardly knew. Certainly he did not seem to
care.
The dawn was not yet. The gas-lamps shone in the murky thoroughfares as
he set out for Piccadilly--alone. The others all went away in hansoms;
he preferred to walk. And even when he reached his rooms, he did not go
to bed at once; he sat up thinking, a prey to a strange sort of
restlessness that had of late taken possession of him. For this young
man's gay and happy butterfly-life was entirely gone. The tragic
disappearance of Nina, followed by the sudden shattering of all his
visionary hopes in connection with Honnor Cunyngham, had left him in a
troubled, anxious, morbid state that he himself, perhaps, could not well
have accounted for. Then the sense of solitariness that he had
experienced when he found that Nina had so unexpectedly vanished from
his ken had been intensified since he had taken to declining invitations
from his fashionable friends, and spending his nights in the aimless
distraction of gambling at the Garden Club.
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