Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/92

 when suspicion grows a sickening certainty. He asked for long odds against him, and he has got them with a vengeance; the odds of the loaded dice. While as for that curled darling he dreamed of, who was to sweep the board and declare himself the chosen, where is he? He has dropped by the roadside, many a mile behind. From henceforth on they must not look to join hands again.

Some there are who have the rare courage, at the realising point, to kick the board over and declare against further play. Stout-hearted ones they, worthy of marble and brass; but you meet them not at every turn of the way. Such a man I forgathered with by accident, one late autumn, on the almost deserted Lido. The bathing-ladders were drawn up, the tramway was under repair; but the slant sun was still hot on the crinkled sand, and it was not so much a case of paddling suggesting itself as of finding oneself barefoot and paddling without any conscious process of thought. So I paddled along dreamily, and thought of Ulysses, and how he might have run the prow of his galley up on these very sands, and sprung ashore and paddled; and then it was that I met him—not Ulysses, but the instance in point.

He was barelegged also, this elderly man of sixty or thereabouts: and he had just found a cavallo del mare, and exhibited it with all the delight of a boy; and as we wandered together, cool-footed, eastwards, I learnt by degrees how such a man as this, with the mark of Cheapside still evident on him, came to be pacing the sands of the Lido that evening with me. He had been Secretary, it transpired, to some venerable Company or Corporation that dated from Henry the Seventh; and among his duties, which were various and engrossing, was in especial that of ticking off, with a blue pencil, the members of his governing body, as they made their appearance at their weekly meeting; in accordance with the practice dating