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 Rh mustachios, when you might take a nice quiet hand with me at home. But no! anything but cribbage with your own wife!

"Caudle, it's all over now; you've gone to destruction. I never knew a man enter a billiard-room that he wasn't lost for ever. There was my uncle Wardle; a better man never broke the bread of life: he took to billiards, and he didn't live with aunt a month afterwards.

"A lucky fellow?

"And that's what you call a man who leaves his wife—a 'lucky fellow'? But, to be sure, what can I expect? We shall not be together long, now: it's been some time coming, but, at last, we must separate: and the wife I've been to you!

"But I know who it is; it's that fiend Prettyman. I will call him a fiend, and I'm by no means a foolish woman: you'd no more have thought of billiards than a goose, if it hadn't been for him. Now, it's no use, Caudle, your telling me that you have only been once, and that you can't hit a ball anyhow—you'll soon get over all that; and then you'll never be at home. You'll be a marked man, Caudle; yes, marked: there'll be something about you that'll be dreadful; for if I couldn't