Page:Achmed Abdullah--Wings.djvu/84

68 and the other congratulated him on his quickness.

So he had played.

And he had lost.

"Never mind," the captain had consoled him. "We must all stump up for our apprenticeship."

The play had been small, and that first day he had not lost much—just a few gold pieces, which did not worry him.

But the next evening some cavalrymen had dropped in; they were wealthy men, sons of Norman farmers and Lyons bankers. They had forced the game again and again until finally the roof was the limit.

He had lost more than the rest. He had wired to his mother, and she had promptly remitted.

Her husband had been in the army, her father, her grandfather. She knew. She understood. She even laughed a little at the tragic wording of the telegram which he had sent.

"We must all grow up, my boy," she had told him on his visit home in October, when he had taken a short leave to shoot birds. "A little cards will not hurt you. We're not paupers."

At the end of the maneuvers his regiment had been sent to Paris. There had been more cards.