Page:Achmed Abdullah--Wings.djvu/82

66 huge gray castle, which had housed one of his name and race since the days of Pepin the Bold.

Only the keeper s lodge remained; and there, in the damp, flat-roofed hovel built of rough-hewn stones, his mother lived now lived—like a peasant woman.

And he was here in New York, worthless and nameless.

He clenched his fists. He gave a little cry of impotent fury.

Then he laughed. He thought of the life-insurance agent who somehow had drifted up to his room that very morning and had tried to insure him against death.

The fool! To ask a man to protect himself against the only hopeful, the only pure moment of life!

His memory swayed up into the past as the sea sways to the touch of the moon.

It had been cards at first; and afterward the little ivory ball which drops so noiselessly, so fatefully:

Vingt-quatre—noir—impaire—passe. Those foolish words and the bits of gaudy paste-