The morrow was to be to him the beginning of a new era.

He stood now at the door of his treasure-house.
He might now cast all his old cares away.

During the next year he should be able to pay off what he owed, and then he would begin to put by.

But, while he thus speculated, his eye fell upon his over-worked horses, and the anxious face of his old bailiff, and a vague fear crept, like a loathly insect, over the fluttering leaves of his hopes; for he had staked all on this cast; he had so mortgaged his land that at this moment he hardly knew how much of it was his own; and all this to raise still higher the social dignity of his family tree! The baron himself was much altered during the last few years.

A wrinkled brow, two fretful lines around the mouth, and gray hair on the temples: these were the results of his eternal thought about capital, his family, and the future aggrandizement of the property.