closed, proceeded to climb the stairs, and
entered his room over the front shop. There,
instead of beginning to undress himself, he seated
himself on the bedside, and remained perfectly
still for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.
Opposite to the bed was a sort of cupboard
contrived in the thickness of the wall, by the side of
the one small window that lighted the room. To
this he then went, and from behind some articles
of clothing on the uppermost shelf, drew forth
a large key. Having possessed himself of this,
he again sat down on the bed for several minutes.
He then arose, and creeping noiselessly to the stair-
head, again paused there some minutes. It might
have been thought impossible for the old man to
have descended the steep narrow stair with the
perfect noiselessness with which he contrived to
do it. Once at the bottom, he rapidly, but with
caution to avoid the slightest sound, poured from
his lamp a drop or two of oil on the wards of the
key in his hand, and then applied it to the door
of the safe in which Carlo had locked the
cavaliere's hundred dollars. The key was, in
fact, a duplicate one, laid aside when the other
had years ago been entrusted to Laura for the
nightly custody of the more precious articles in
the shop, and long since forgotten, till the
recollection of it had unfortunately occurred to
the old jeweller, during his pacing under the
Uffizi colonnade.

In less than a minute the two rolls of dollars
were in his hands, and leaving the lamp burning
on the work-bench, he stealthily stepped through
the doorway on to the bridge, and quietly closed
the door behind him.

Laudadio Vanni had been, though a gambler
during the latter part of his life, yet an upright,
honourable, and strictly honest man throughout
all the many years of it, and it was in vain that he
strove to conceal from himself the nature of the
action he was now committing. The big drops
stood on his wrinkled brow, and dropped from
the ends of the straggling silver locks that fell
on either side of his hollow emaciated cheeks.
He trembled visibly; and instead of hastening at
once on his errand, he paused at the top of the
bridge under the colonnade, which at that part
of it leaves the river visible. It was by this
time nearly half-past eleven. The lottery offices
on the night previous to the drawing remain
open till twelve. After the first stroke of the
clocks sounding midnight, no stake could be
played for the morrow's drawing. Yet still he
paused. It seemed as if he were half minded to
give his honour and fair name the advantage in
their struggle with the demon which possessed
him, of the chance that he might be too late to
accomplish his purpose.

There is under the arches, in the space void of
houses, at the top of the bridge, an ancient and
dingy picture of a Madonna, in a wooden
tabernacle against the wall, and a little dimly twinkling
oil-lamp was burning before it. He examined
the two rolls of money in the faint ray of light
thrown by this lamp, to ascertain that there was
no writing on the paper in which they were
wrapped; and then turned towards the parapet,
and leaning on it again paused, while the minutes
ran on quickly towards the moment at which the
power of the tempter would be at an end. It
wanted now but ten minutes of the time. But
there is no part of the city in which that is not
more than ample time enough for reaching a
lottery receiving house. The paternal government
takes care that the demon of play shall be
ever at every man's elbow.

"What would they think of me," he cried,
suddenly—"what would they think of me, if they
knew all that I know, and knew, also, that I
hesitated to obtain the prize for them? The
money won with their money will be all theirs, of
course. When I give it them, I shall say,
'Now will you believe that your old father's days
and nights of study are worth something?'"

And as he muttered thus to himself, he hurried
to the well-known counter, and thrusting himself
among the crowd of wretches who were staking
the halfpence they had succeeded in procuring
just in time, he startled the clerks by putting
down his two rouleaux for a terno on the numbers
37, 25, and 28.

The officials in these hells are not unaccustomed
to strange sights. Remark on them in no wise
enters into their functions. So the money was
swept up; and the vile looking little strip of
coarse grey-blue paper was duly scrawled over,
signed, sanded, and put into his shaking hand.

As he quitted the den, the great bell of the
palazzo vecchio began to toll twelve. The yawning
clerks shut up their books, and "the game
was made" for that week.

After having carefully secured the precious
document in an inner pocket, Laudadio's first
movement was to return to his home, and he
began to walk in that direction. But his steps
became slower and slower, and by the time he
had reached the foot of the bridge, he felt that
he could not endure to pass the remaining hours
of the night in the stillness of his little room
over the shop. He felt a strange reluctance, too,
to enter his house again, and pass by that safe
in the wall at the bottom of the stairs. No! he
would go home no more, till he should go in with
his triumph and his justification in his hand. So
he turned back once more towards the Uffizi
colonnade, and again paced forwards and
backwards under the now silent and deserted
porticos.

But strangely enough, the result of the
desperate stake he had played for, which had
seemed to him so safe and certain an hour ago,
while the "to be or not to be" was still in his own
hands, began, now the fatal step was taken, and
the irrevocable die cast, to appear less
inaccessible to doubts as to the issue. It was one
of those revulsions of feeling which the most
compendious scheme of ethical philosophy loves
to ascribe to the immediate action of the
traitorous fiend; but which the students of
mental phenomena would attribute to the sense