me, for the highest stakes. And here
was I, a little extra stake tossed on to the board. He had vowed I had
it in me to do "something big." Perhaps, though, there had been a
touch of make-believe about that. I am afraid it was not before my
thought about myself that my moral sense began to operate and my hatred
of Pethel set in. Put it to my credit that I did see myself as a mere
detail in his villainy. You deprecate the word "villainy"? Understand
all, forgive all? No doubt. But between the acts of understanding and
forgiving an interval may sometimes be condoned. Condone it in this
instance. Even at the time I gave Pethel due credit for risking his
own life, for having doubtless risked it--it and none other--again and
again in the course of his adventurous (and abstemious) life by field
and flood. I was even rather touched by memory of his insistence last
night on another glass of that water which just MIGHT give him typhoid;
rather touched by memory of his unsaying that he "never" touched
alcohol--he who, in point of fact, had to be ALWAYS gambling on
something or other. I gave him due credit, too, for his devotion to
his daughter. But his use of that devotion, his cold use of it to
secure for himself the utmost thrill of hazard, did seem utterly
abominable to me.

And it was even more for the mother than for the daughter that I was
incensed. That daughter did not know him, did but innocently share his
damnable love of chances; but that wife had for years known him at
least as well as I knew him now. Here again I gave him credit for
wishing, though he didn't love her, to spare her what he could. That
he didn't love her I presumed from his indubitable willingness not to
stake her in this afternoon's game. That he never had loved her--had
taken her in his precocious youth simply as a gigantic chance against
him, was likely enough. So much the more credit to him for such
consideration as he showed her, though this was little enough. He
could wish to save her from being a looker-on at his game, but he
could--he couldn't not--go on playing. Assuredly she was right in
deeming him at once the strongest and the weakest of men. "Rather a
nervous woman!" I remembered an engraving that had hung in my room at
Oxford, and in scores of other rooms there: a presentment by Sir Marcus
(then Mr.) Stone of a very pretty young person in a Gainsborough hat,
seated beneath an ancestral elm, looking as though she were