Black and red, red and black, they danced before him; they
assumed extravagant attitudes; they became the symbols of tremendous
mysteries. His head seemed to grow lighter; he was visited with
fantastic impulses like the caprices of an intoxicated person. To
turn on the Colonel and ask him what he meant by inflicting this
torture on an innocent man, whose only crime had been to trust him
too well; to shake the inscrutable Miss Tancred by the hand and tell
her that he knew all--_all_, and that she had his sympathy; to fall
on Mrs. Fazakerly's neck and cry like a child, he felt that he was
capable of any or all of these things. As it was, his behavior must
have been sufficiently ridiculous, since it amused Mrs. Fazakerly so
much. The two had reached that topsy-turvy height of anguish that is
only expressible by laughter. Theirs had a ring of insanity in it;
it sounded monstrous and immoral, like the mirth of victims under
the shadow of condign extinction. As for his play, he knew it was
the play of a madman. And yet he still won; with Miss Tancred for
his partner it was impossible to lose. She sat there unmoved by his
wildest aberrations. Once, to be sure, she remarked with a shade of
irritation in her voice (by some queer freak of nature her voice was
unusually sweet), "Oh, _there_! We've got that trick again!" Like
him, she would have preferred to lose, just to break the maddening
monotony of it.

He pitied her. Once, in a lucid interval, he actually heard himself
paying her a compliment, much as he would have paid a debt of honor.
"Miss Tancred, how magnificently you play!" She answering, "I ought
to. I've been doing nothing else since I was ten years old." It was
simply horrible. The woman was thirty if she was a day.

Half past eleven. Midnight gathering in the garden outside. The room
was reflected on the window-pane from the solid darkness behind
it--the candles, the green table, the players--a fantastic, illusive
scene, shimmering on the ground of night as on some sinister
reality. Mrs. Fazakerly was dashing down her cards at random, and
even the Colonel shuffled uneasily in his seat. At twelve he
observed that none of them "seemed very happy in whist"; he proposed
loo, a game in which, each person playing for his own hand, he could
not be compromised by the ruinous folly of his partner.

At loo Miss Tancred, also untrammeled, rose to dizzying heights of
play. She hovered over the green table, motionless like an