Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/34

 morning. “I can't help you. Everything's mortgaged except the family ghost. Play up to our Cockney visitor. If he takes our place for a season or two, I'll help you out. Once more,” he had added, dropping his negligent manner as if it were a cloak, “once more—and for the very last time!”

“Come on in and myke your bets,” said Mr. Preserved Higgins. “Ain't you got no guts?”

“I tilt that bet a pony, Mr. Higgins,” said Tollemache.

“And a monkey!” countered the irrepressible millionaire, tossing a dozen chips into the pot.

“See you!” from Hector.

And the game continued while the earl sank back into his chair and picked up a certain scandalous sporting paper, black on pink, which is much more popular with the nobility and gentry—we shall not mention the upper clergy—of Merry England than Bishop Taylor's “Lives of the Saints.”

He had dozed off over “Old Etonian's” comment on the county cricket averages when a sudden exclamation from Mr. Preserved Higgins startled him wide awake:

“Go'blyme! No wonder I'm losin' my plurry pants! S'y—these 'ere cards …”

“What is the matter with them?” Hector cut in sternly, threateningly leaning across the table, his dark, hawkish features, as they came within the radius of the low-hanging lamp, suffused with a terrible, corroding rage—the sudden, killing rage of the Wades of Dealle.