On leaving the third saloon the young man counted his store. There
were but nine remaining, three in one tray and six in the other.

"Gentlemen," said he, addressing himself to his two new followers,
"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