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 *quire. At least, it is hardly likely that Grandma had taught her.

The Olympians also had misspent their youth a little, and Horace Allwright's father had been a billiard-marker, so it was quite as well, perhaps, that Mary was so skillful, and that Philip was able to say he was a pupil of Mr. John Roberts, Junior. The master might not have been very proud of him, though, to judge by the way he started; but he improved as the game went on, and as Johnny Dubosque knew Stevenson to talk to, the game was quite worth looking at in the opinion of a somewhat saturnine-looking gentleman who sat in the corner drinking Schweppe's ginger ale, and picking winners out of the Sportsman.

The game was twenty-nine all, and there was only one ball left on the table, and that was "a sitter" on the brink of the left-hand top pocket, which Mary, who had played amazingly well all through, had left there to her unfeigned sorrow. It was all over, bar the shouting, when Toddles proceeded to deliver his cue, for it really was a shot that one who had used his youth as he had done ought not to have missed with his eyes shut.

In the most unaccountable manner the famous center forward missed the shot with his eyes wide open, promptly apostrophized his Maker, and insisted in paying the stakes.