The four were in Lady Felicia's sittingroom now. The maids were dismissed for the night, all but Felicia's, a discreet hand of middle age whom nothing could scare. Then, almost without a word wasted on small talk, the game began. The luck of the cut paired Mary with the hostess, and Twiggy with Muriel, for the first game.

"Penny points?" said Felicia, with a cold smile to her partner. "You 're no novice now."

At the end of half an hour Mary was the richer by a couple of pounds. It was a new experience for her, the winning of money worth the count, and it had a fascination of its own. Her father had been almost her only antagonist at cards, and her contests with him had rarely left her the better or worse by more than a florin. But forty shillings! It was like a beginning of income. First earnings always mark a new epoch in life.

"Look at it!" she laughed.

"Millionaire soon, at this rate," said

Muriel.

Then there were ups and downs; and Polly blundered, and Di-for they became all nicknames now-bit her lip, and" Fliss" laughingly said, "Better luck next time," and Twiggy, whose mother owned mines in Bilbao, alone seemed unaware that any thing had happened either way.

Finally, with a serious change in the luck, poor Polly lost all her winnings and something more in a single deal.

"I think I'll go to bed now," she said. "Try a change of partners and sixpenny points," said Lady Felicia, dryly. "It may change the luck. We can book it, you know, Polly. Di 's the clearing-house; and we 'll settle up at the end."

and it was really difficult to regard these as the devil's playthings while they dropped so gracefully from the direction of the sky. The very rhythm in their slight rustle over the polished surfaces was music of a kind. The bared white arm was quite motionless; only the wrist moved, and that almost imperceptibly but for a point of light in her diamond bracelet that rose and fell with an even beat.

They examined their cards, their brows, smooth or troubled, marking degrees of proficiency in the game. Mary pursued her studies with a frown.

Muriel, as dealer, had the right to decide on the trump suit; but she passed it on to Lady Felicia, with the formula: "Partner, I'll leave it to you."

Felicia having made her choice, the initiative in raising the value of the stakes came to Ethel as leader. She decided to double, so the points became shilling ones. at a stroke. Mary checked herself in futile dissent with a gasp. The next moment she was all aglow with the gambler's everlasting hope of a miracle.

The charm of this delightful game is that the stake, big or little, has the illusory nature of all matter in the best philosophic systems. It is a single grain of sand at one moment; at another, by doubling and redoubling at the will of individual players, it becomes a whole Sahara.

Ethel led, with an engaging indifference to results which marked her proceedings from first to last. Felicia, becoming exofficio dummy as partner of the dealer, exposed her hand on the table and simply watched the game. If Mary had been able to look up, she might have found a sort of terror in the steely eyes. The watcher's interests, however, were in excellent keeping, for dummy's hand was played by Muriel.

It was a scene of strange contrasts, the old and the new. The players, with their charm of age and sex and evening toilets, sat in a turret-chamber with walls a yard thick, glowing in the electric light. The middle ages had blinked and shivered here in the glare of pine torches stuck in the wall, in the fitful warmth of log fires with the open casement for their chimney, and in breezes that sometimes inflated the tapestry like a balloon. There was tapestry still, but it was only part of a decorative

scheme, of which innumerable curios in the precious metals, and trifles of every imaginable description in hardly less precious fancy leather, with bronzes, watercolors, sofas, rugs, skins of the chase, and a heavy Persian carpet as a welcome substitute for green rushes, formed the details.

But the strangest contrast was in the young women themselves. The stern game unsexed them, and they became as hard as men in the like condition. They were playing for money,-playing for an income, in the case of Muriel, -and they took on the fierce, relentless manner of all who are fighting for life. The environment is everything. Put Milton's Eve at the pit mouth, to which so many of her daughters have drifted, and softness and sweet attractive grace will no longer be her distinguishing charm. Give the Dorothea of Cervantes a tough hand to play for her bread and butter, or at any rate for her pins, and she will have the characteristics, if not exactly the manners, of the betting-ring. They were hard and curt in question and answer, with scant consideration for one another's little weaknesses and little ways. Man, the idealizer, might have been troubled had he heard and seen. Mr. Gooding kept the chamber under observation from his window in a rectangular wing. It was lucky that nothing more reached him than a ray of light from the chink of a curtain imperfectly closed.

XXXIII

PAST one o'clock and a cloudy morning, and ten minutes for refreshment. They rose, stretched themselves. Felicia sent for her dressing-gown, and her maid, on returning with it, noiselessly mended the fire, so as to cause no scandal to a house at rest. She then put cigarettes on the table, with tea, and waters weak and strong-the latter in the form of cognac from her ladyship's dressing-case. They chatted awhile, chiefly in slang and nicknames-all but Mary, who was now forty pounds to the bad. She was ready to run for it now in sheer terror, but she was held back by two considerations-the fear of ridicule, the forlorn hope of recovering her losses.

Play resumed, but with no change of partners, the victors having generously offered the others their revenge. The house is fast asleep, save perhaps for the distant smoking-room, where Tom Penniquicke

and his cronies still take up their wondrous tale of the shortcomings of their order. His subject to-night is the scandal of the card-table in great houses. The best and the worst of all talk is not so much what is said as what is assumed. The thing assumed here is the cancerous corruption of a section of society-the matron ready to pay in kind the gambling debts she is unable to pay in specie; the girl held in pawn by the profligate with the dread of exposure.

Mr. Gooding, no longer cheered, or rather tormented, by the wandering ray, turns in, under the delusive belief that the sitting is at an end. He is much mistaken. They are at two-shilling points now. Mary owes sixty pounds, and is ready for anything, in her desperate desire to recover herself.

Has her chance come? Muriel deals her a capital hand in hearts-king, knave, nine, and smaller fry, with equally fair cards of other suits; and, at the same time, declares hearts for the trump.

Ethel declines to double, but passes it on to her partner. Now is the time for the manoeuver by which Mary herself has been so heavily hit.

She doubles.

Muriel redoubles as calmly as if she were taking a stroke at croquet.

Mary hopes that none may hear her heart beat under the shock of surprise; but it is all or nothing now. She redoubles.

Then they close for the shock of battle. Ethel, by way of response to her partner's suggestion of great strength in trumps, leads out her single heart.

Alas! the strong man holdeth only on a well-known condition. Muriel, by the sheer luck of the deal, has a still better hand than Mary, and, with ace, queen, ten, and other trumps at command, is able promptly to put the lead into dummy's hand.

It is the Sedan of poor Mary's plan of campaign, not ill devised as it was on the ordinary calculation of chances.

Dummy leads hearts, and Muriel is able to "sit over" Mary every time.

When a conflict has reached this stage, the humane spectator withdraws. No one cares to look on sheer butchery.

Mary makes no count in trumps, and finally loses four tricks, counting sixty-four each, on a score already working out at something over a thousand.

Her total loss now stands at one hundred and fifty pounds.

The game is over; the dawn will be here soon. They rise for leave-taking, but not so hurriedly as to preclude a kiss all round.

Gamblers are rarely nice to look at after an all-night sitting, and these young people are no exception to the rule. They are the mere wreckage of the stately order in which they entered the arena yesterday for their triumphs of the drawing-room. Their hair is a tangle of shreds of coiffure; their eyes are lusterless and rimmed with the stains of fatigue; their lips are dry. Toilets that were studied compositions in the carelessness of art are now all astray in the muddle of mere untidiness. Their unwashed hands have sought brow and cheek in the anguish of the struggle, and left their mark.

The room is even worse than its occupants. It is the room that awaits the housemaid every morning in all our houses, but aggravated in the grossness of its effects: rugs, table-covers, all awry, soda-water bottles littering the floor, even a tumbler or two with a sediment of stale drink, stumps of cigarettes, cards crunched underfoot-in a word, disgusting, and more than ever so in its association with a sex of which refinement of habit is the essential charm. Yet the innermost misery of all is not in these things, but in the fact that girlhood has, for the first time in social history, been smirched with these revolting associations. Wicked old women have played for gain in all ages. It has been reserved for ours to admit young ones who ought to be innocent to the partnership of such unholy rites.

66

Settling day to-morrow, dear, if you don't mind," whispers Lady Felicia in Mary's ear. "We 're leaving after luncheon."

It says much for Mary's innocence that she takes no thought of her trinkets in this emergency, and, in short, never once remembers that beyond an angry father may be found a placid "uncle" at need. It is but a stage, no doubt, in the experience of modern girlhood, but it is most refreshing to the beholder while it lasts.

So she gives only a feeble smile in response, rushes to her room, and, with the most shocking terrors of remorse, throws herself on her bed with "Gambler! gambler! gambler!" singing in her ears.

Mr. Gooding might almost as well have

made a night of it, too, for all the comfort he had of his couch. He rose after fitful slumbers, and drew his curtains to look for dawn. It was almost broad daylight. A cloaked female figure paced the terrace below at a rate that signified either a cold morning or a troubled mind. A single glance at the figure showed him that it was Mary, so he decided for the troubled mind. He rose, and was soon by her side.

The poor creature was in torment. She had lost what with her means and opportunities she could never recover. Her debt of honor was even more binding than any other, but how was it to be paid at short notice? Her allowance, reduced as it had voluntarily been on her part since the beginning of her father's troubles, would never suffice. The thought of the poor old man was maddening. Was she, his mainstay in trouble, to be a second Tom?

But she was brave still, and she returned the young man's greeting with composure. "You are out early," she said. The hard, dry voice, with all the youth gone out of it, told half her tale.

"Looking for an appetite for breakfast. You have n't seen anything of the sort about?"

"If I had," she returned in the same cheerless tone, "I am afraid I should have appropriated it, for I came first."

"I surrender my claims in any case."

'Oh, I was not thinking of that at all," she said impatiently, her self-command yielding a little, in spite of her, to the appalling friction of the nerves that was going on within.

"I dare n't ask questions."

She felt that she was betraying herself, and tried to change her tone.

"Well, if you want to know, I was thinking of the strangest thing in the world." "Oh, please share the joke with a friend."

friend who threatens to tell!" she whispered with the parting kiss.

They were still at the hall door when a groom came in sight. He was from Liddicot, and the bearer of a scrawl from her father:

For God's sake, Polly, come home at once! "What is it?" she faltered.

"News from Mr. Tom, miss. But don't you take on: he 's only wounded.”

It was the last straw. With the strangest little upward look and smile, as of deprecation of fresh trouble, she fainted. ANOTHER and a far more dreadful message of doom was to come next day to Allonby,

to all England, and to all the Britains. The last of the Points were leaving the castle, still on their endless round of pleasure, when even they were startled by the thunderclap of the Queen's death. They seemed to fall apart from one another under the shock, and to be converted in a moment from a band of revelers in full cry into a flying crowd of phantoms scattering before the presence of a great reality. The flag fell half-mast at the castle, and with sorrow in the household, sorrow in the state, the great bell tolled the end of an epoch. For such it was, whatever else was to come for the Queen's realm in the providence of God.

W

HEN "Evidenced by Service" was published it met with an instant and overwhelming success. His friends-and in truth most readers were that, for he was a popular author and had written much-finished its perusal with three states of emotion striving for the mastery-surprise, admiration, and regret. His other books, while they had all been honest, wholesome, pleasing novels, had not led them to expect anything at once so deep, so brilliant, so subtle as this. In each human being, it has been said, there is at least one real book, one real romance. This was his.

The conception of the novel was so startling and original, it was worked out on such strong and unusual lines, the characters were so finely drawn, and the affection of the woman who filled the center of the story was evidenced in so strange and powerful a way, by an act of unprecedented service to, and sacrifice for, her lover, that his warmest admirers even, to say nothing of the public generally, were

lost in admiration. The critics, even the great ones whose words have weight, praised the book without a dissenting voice; the presses put forth edition after edition, and the book-stores could hardly keep pace with the eager buyers. It was the literary sensation not only of the day, and of the season, but of the year.

The regret of it all was that he was no longer alive to enjoy his belated but unequivocal triumph. He had been an oldfashioned author in many respects, never making use of a secretary or a type-writer, for instance, but writing his books laboriously out in longhand. They found him dead one morning seated before his desk, his head bowed upon his left arm, and that arm upon the manuscript of this last story. The pen was still clasped in his hand. He was indifferent now to praise or blame, success or failure. He had been a hard, persistent worker with his busy pen. all his life, and it was a great pity that success came so late-too late.

The last words that he had written had