sh in the pantry out of reach. Schomberg flung himself
backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if swallowing sobs.

"No wonder you can do with me what you like. You have no idea--just let
me tell you of my trouble--"

"I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble," said Mr. Jones,
in his most lifelessly positive voice.

He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the uncanniness
of his thin shanks. Ricardo followed at his leader's heels; but he
showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.

CHAPTER SIX

From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena in
Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's casual
notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to return
Mrs. Schomberg's Indian shawl. And strangely enough, they lasted
some considerable time. It argued either honesty and bad luck or
extraordinary restraint on the part of "plain Mr. Jones and Co." in
their discreet operations with cards.

It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled up
on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by two
dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with green
cloth. In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker,
faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier.
By contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty
and thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely
artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their innocent watch for the
small turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for
them. They had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray
with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk
on its hind legs.

As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the
billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air
of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks
went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room over there
under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel. He submitted himself
to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism compounded of fear and
resignation. Directly the party had broken up, (he could see dark
shapes of the men drifting singly and in knots through the gate of
the