are down, and the
game is suddenly seen to be lost. One small other shuffle might have won
it; if that tray of spades had fallen one place to the right or left,
the thing would now be easy; if it were a deuce or a four, the thing
were easy. One spot on the card has brought ruin. The game has foiled us
with its own peculiar cleverness.

But then, we learn to expect failure; and, most important of all, we
learn to succeed while failing. We learn to see our cards fall
wretchedly without a tremor. We learn to take small gains that offer,
and to watch unmoved while splendid chances come to naught. We learn to
live life and to waste no energy in vain wishing that we had shuffled
differently. We learn even to marvel admiringly at the unobtrusive
cunning which thwarts us of our dream's own--to wonder that cards ever
should come right for any player in that maze of chances and faulty
judgments. And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without
loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.

As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat--one must be most
careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found--it was not strange
that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.

I had mused often upon it since that first night. It seemed, curiously
enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes,
a girl's face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the
face of another I had better reason to know. Unaccountably they had come
and gone, one followed by the other. Of that last new face in my vision
I could make nothing, save that some one seemed to have painted it over
there in the other house. How I had come by my own mind copy of it was a
mystery to me beyond solution.

I played the game again to still this perplexity which had a way of
seizing me at odd moments. It is an especially good game for a man who
has had to believe that life will always beat him.

CHAPTER XIX

A WORTHLESS BLACK HOUND

After an autumn speciously benign came our season of cold and snow. It
proved to be a season of unwonted severity, every weather expert in
town, from Uncle William McCormick, who had kept a diary record for
thirty years, to Grandma Steck, who had foretold its coming from a
goose-bone, agreeing that the cold was most unusual. The editor of the
_Argus_ not only spoke of "Nature's snowy mantle," but coined another
happy phrase about Little Arcady being "locked i