man, stout and
impassive.

"Is Mr. Dennison here, do you know, Hocking?" asked Ashton-Kirk.

"Yes, sir, in the smoking-room," replied the man, impassively, but with
certainty.

In the smoking-room they came upon Dennison, purple of jowl, with his
white fat hands folded across his paunch, smoking a cigarette and
looking out at a window.

"Oh, how are you?" lifting his eyes, but never stirring. "How do,
Scanlon?"

"Quite comfortable here of an afternoon," said Ashton-Kirk as he dropped
into a chair at the other side of the window. "I had no idea."

"How could you have?" complained Dennison; "you drop in only once or
twice in a year, and then only of a night, and when old Hungerford is in
town."

Ashton-Kirk smiled as he thought of those rare nights with Hungerford
over the chess board--nights when he matched himself against an
intelligence almost mystical, and out of each contact with which he
emerged, drenched with new understanding.

"I suppose that's so," he admitted. "But I should get here oftener." He
looked interestedly at the other, and added: "Get over your little jolt
of the other night all right?"

"I'm pretty shaky." Dennison looked at Bat who had possessed himself of
an easy chair. "I don't know if Scanlon knows anything about how I'm
doing or not. He's giving me confounded little attention. Never in, it
seems, when I get there, and one of his understrappers must put me
through."

"It all depends on yourself at this point in the race," spoke Scanlon,
easily. "In a week or so _I'll_ be ready to take you on. I'll be able to
see what I'm doing then."

"Oh, I say, I'm not so beastly fleshy as all that!" protested Dennison,
indignantly.

"Don't pay any attention to him," said Ashton-Kirk, smiling. "A thing
such as you went through would be likely to upset any one."

"Of course it would," agreed Dennison, eagerly. "Tom Burton and myself
were pretty intimate, and to find out suddenly that he'd gone down like
that! Of course it would upset any one."

"You knew Burton for a long time, did you?"

"Not so very; maybe for seven or eight years. I met him at Danforth's
place one night when he was playing roulette in big luck. That was about
a year before he married Nora Cavanaugh, the actress." Dennison lighted
a flat Turkish cigarette and inhaled a deep draught of smoke. "I was
kind of surprised to hear about him being married, for he'd always
talked against that state. He said it got a man into a grea