s the card of cards, and play it he would, to
the limit, when the opening came. He could not see that opening yet.
The present game would have to play to some sort of a conclusion first.

Yet he could not shake from his brain and vision the warm recollection
of those bronze slippers, that clinging gown, and all the feminine
softness and pliancy of Dede in her pretty Berkeley rooms. Once again,
on a rainy Sunday, he telephoned that he was coming. And, as has
happened ever since man first looked upon woman and called her good,
again he played the blind force of male compulsion against the woman's
secret weakness to yield. Not that it was Daylight's way abjectly to
beg and entreat. On the contrary, he was masterful in whatever he did,
but he had a trick of whimsical wheedling that Dede found harder to
resist than the pleas of a suppliant lover. It was not a happy scene
in its outcome, for Dede, in the throes of her own desire, desperate
with weakness and at the same time with her better judgment hating her
weakness cried out:--

"You urge me to try a chance, to marry you now and trust to luck for it
to come out right. And life is a gamble say. Very well, let us
gamble. Take a coin and toss it in the air. If it comes heads, I'll
marry you. If it doesn't, you are forever to leave me alone and never
mention marriage again."

A fire of mingled love and the passion of gambling came into Daylight's
eyes. Involuntarily his hand started for his pocket for the coin.
Then it stopped, and the light in his eyes was troubled.

"Go on," she ordered sharply. "Don't delay, or I may change my mind,
and you will lose the chance."

"Little woman." His similes were humorous, but there was no humor in
their meaning. His thought was as solemn as his voice. "Little woman,
I'd gamble all the way from Creation to the Day of Judgment; I'd gamble
a golden harp against another man's halo; I'd toss for pennies on the
front steps of the New Jerusalem or set up a faro layout just outside
the Pearly Gates; but I'll be everlastingly damned if I'll gamble on
love. Love's too big to me to take a chance on. Love's got to be a
sure thing, and between you and me it is a sure thing. If the odds was
a hundred to one on my winning this flip, just the same, nary a flip."

In the spring of the year the Great Panic came on. The first warning
was when the banks began calling in their unprotected loans. Daylight
promptly paid the first severa