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 chips towered high on the roulette tables and whose dwindled. Now and then she stopped to follow the progress of a hand of bridge, or to stand behind some chair in obedience to the occupant's plea that she do so "to change my luck"; then strolled on again, a nomadic dart of color against the somber background provided by sixty suits of masculine evening clothes. She was wearing an orange gown that outlined her figure abruptly as a scissored paper-doll's and lit wee dancing lanterns in her eyes. She looked arrestingly lovely and extremely youthful, did Jock's mother. She seemed every inch the charming, the popular, the distinguished hostess; and not at all did she seem what she was. . . a lady making her living, just as she had made it every night for almost twelve years. . ..

Every night, that is, except the ones when Jock was with her. And even in twelve years there had not been many of those. Two weeks at Christmas, a week at Easter, a brief hiatus between the closing of school or college and the opening of camp or summer school—no more. Jock's vacations were, and had ever been, at once the glory and the bane of Madelaine Hamill's existence. They meant precious intimacy with the son she adored and knew only too little; but they meant also a wholesale housecleaning, a hiding-away of tables and wheels and all other damaging evidence, an incessant falsehood, an incessant panic for fear in some unthought of, unimaginable way, he might discover what it was that paid his bills and bought his education. . ..

"You're ridiculous," her good friend Saunders Lincoln told her often, "to try so hard to keep it secret. My dear Madelaine, surely you don't think any twentieth century college boy is going to faint away at the sight of a roulette wheel?"