a bench.
She could not, to Ricardo's thinking, be more than twenty years of age.
She was certainly quite young. The supple slenderness of her figure
proved it, and he had moreover caught a glimpse, as she rushed out, of
a fresh and very pretty face; but he had lost sight of it now. For the
girl wore a big black satin hat with a broad brim, from which a couple
of white ostrich feathers curved over at the back, and in the shadow of
that hat her face was masked. All that he could see was a pair of long
diamond eardrops, which sparkled and trembled as she moved her
head--and that she did constantly. Now she stared moodily at the
ground; now she flung herself back; then she twisted nervously to the
right, and then a moment afterwards to the left; and then again she
stared in front of her, swinging a satin slipper backwards and forwards
against the pavement with the petulance of a child. All her movements
were spasmodic; she was on the verge of hysteria. Ricardo was expecting
her to burst into tears, when she sprang up and as swiftly as she had
come she hurried back into the rooms. "Summer lightning," thought Mr.
Ricardo.

Near to him a woman sneered, and a man said, pityingly: "She was
pretty, that little one. It is regrettable that she has lost."

A few minutes afterwards Ricardo finished his cigar and strolled back
into the rooms, making his way to the big table just on the right hand
of the entrance, where the play as a rule runs high. It was clearly
running high tonight. For so deep a crowd thronged about the table that
Ricardo could only by standing on tiptoe see the faces of the players.
Of the banker he could not catch a glimpse. But though the crowd
remained, its units were constantly changing, and it was not long
before Ricardo found himself standing in the front rank of the
spectators, just behind the players seated in the chairs. The oval
green table was spread out beneath him littered with bank-notes.
Ricardo turned his eyes to the left, and saw seated at the middle of
the table the man who was holding the bank. Ricardo recognised him with
a start of surprise. He was a young Englishman, Harry Wethermill, who,
after a brilliant career at Oxford and at Munich, had so turned his
scientific genius to account that he had made a fortune for himself at
the age of twenty-eight.

He sat at the table with the indifferent look of the habitual player
upon his cleanly chiselled face. But it was plain that his good fortune