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be a delicate way. "I'm awfully glad you've had a bit of luck, because the fact is it's all the other way with me; I can't do anything right, and, between ourselves——" I saw him hesitate again; I imagine that the decent man which was in him made it difficult for him to ask a woman for money when it came to the pinch.

What she said I could not see, but I conceive of her as saying, struck by his hesitation: "Well, and what is it between ourselves?"

He made a stumbling effort to explain what it was he wanted.

"You know, it's like this: I'm awfully pushed for coin. If you could manage to lend me, say, a hundred out of those winnings of yours——"

She cut him short. I could not tell with what words, but her hand dived into her white satin bag just as they passed through the swing-door out of sight.

Two or three minutes afterwards, when I returned to the Casino, I saw in the crowd round the "little horses" Mr. Clarke sidle up to Mr. Armitage. Both their faces were in plain sight. I could see Mr. Clarke ask:—

"Well, have you got it? Has the sweet young thing been kind?"

Mr. Armitage turned away, as if the other's gibe had roused him to sudden anger; but I saw him hand his companion something as he moved away, and I knew what it was. A few minutes later I saw Mr. Armitage again, going towards the club. He was addressed by a fat, florid-looking man, with an exaggerated moustache. A moustache sometimes screens a man's mouth almost completely; but his was so formed that, despite the absurd dimensions of that hirsute adornment, I could see his lips distinctly. He said to the man he had stopped, with what I fancied was an evil gleam in his bold, blood-shot eyes:—

"I'm sure Mr. Armitage has a five-pound note which he can spare for an old friend who's a little on his uppers."

Mr. Armitage recognized him with what was evidently not a start of satisfaction. "So it's you, Morgan, is it? What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were——"

Mr. Morgan raised his finger to his lips, to prevent the other bringing his sentence to a close.

"Quite so—we won't say where. How about a five-pound note, Mr. Armitage, for a very old friend?"

Mr. Armitage looked at him angrily for a few seconds, then grabbed something out of the pocket of his dinner-jacket which might have been a hundred-franc note. He thrust it into the other's hand and, without waiting for a word of thanks, went quickly on. Mr. Morgan looked at what he had been given, then he looked after the donor—the expression on his face was not that of a grateful man.

I found Miss Drawbridge sitting at the very table on the terrace which had been lately occupied by Mr. Armitage and his friend. As I took the chair in front of her she said to me:—

"That's right, come and talk to me—and have something." She herself was having some curious concoction in a big glass; for me she ordered a lemon-squash. "I've had a good night, my dear. It seems as if I can't lose at baccarat lately—as if my luck had turned; I'm sure it's about time it should. You look a little moped. What's been troubling you?"

I considered for a second or so; then I decided, by degrees, to make the plunge. I approached the subject by what I meant to be a roundabout fashion of my own.

"I've just learnt something rather disagreeable."

"Have you? That's easy; the difficulty is to learn anything else. Is it private, or for publication?"

"I've just learnt that a man who I thought was rather a decent sort is a thief and a rogue, and two or three other things which are rather worse."

"When you've had my experience of life, my dear—which Heaven forbid you ever will—you'll know that that sort of thing is quite common with a man—you must take a man at his own valuation, my dear. We should never get one at all if we took them at ours."

"This man is not only going to marry a woman for her money, but because he doesn't know where he will get money from if he can't from her, and if he doesn't get her money at the earliest possible moment he'll be sent to jail. He's a thoroughly all-round bad lot, the man is, though he doesn't look it."

Miss Drawbridge had her fish-like eyes—they always looked as if they had been boiled—fixed on me with a watery stare.

"What's the gentleman's name?" I knew from her manner that, as the children have it in their game, she was "getting warm." "Does it begin with the first letter of the alphabet?"

"I'm afraid it does."

"What have you found out about Mr.