For instance. On the first evening of this particular visit he
found the rooms hot, and sauntered out into the little
semicircular garden at the back. He sat there for half an hour
under a flawless sky of stars watching the people come and go in
the light of the electric lamps, and appreciating the gowns and
jewels of the women with the eye of a connoisseur; and then into
this starlit quiet there came suddenly a flash of vivid life. A
girl in a soft, clinging frock of white satin darted swiftly from
the rooms and flung herself nervously upon a bench. She could not,
to Ricardo's thinking, be more than twenty years of age. She was
certainly quite young. The supple slenderness of her figure proved
it, and he had moreover caught a glimpse, as she rushed out, of a
fresh and very pretty face; but he had lost sight of it now. For
the girl wore a big black satin hat with a broad brim, from which
a couple of white ostrich feathers curved over at the back, and in
the shadow of that hat her face was masked. All that he could see
was a pair of long diamond eardrops, which sparkled and trembled
as she moved her head--and that she did constantly. Now she stared
moodily at the ground; now she flung herself back; then she
twisted nervously to the right, and then a moment afterwards to
the left; and then again she stared in front of her, swinging a
satin slipper backwards and forwards against the pavement with the
petulance of a child. All her movements were spasmodic; she was on
the verge of hysteria. Ricardo was expecting her to burst into
tears, when she sprang up and as swiftly as she had come she
hurried back into the rooms. "Summer lightning," thought Mr.
Ricardo.
Near to him a woman sneered, and a man said, pityingly: "She was
pretty, that little one. It is regrettable that she has lost."
A few minutes afterwards Ricardo finished his cigar and strolled
back into the rooms, making his way to the big table just on the
right hand of the entrance, where the play as a rule runs high. It
was clearly running high tonight. For so deep a crowd thronged
about the table that Ricardo could only by standing on tiptoe see
the faces of the players. Of the banker he could not catch a
glimpse. But though the crowd remained, its units were constantly
changing, and it was not long before Ricardo found himself
standing in the front rank of the spectators, just behind the
players seated in the chairs. The oval green table was spread out
beneath him littered with bank-notes. Ricardo turned his eyes to
the left, and saw seated at the middle of the table the man who
was holding the bank. Ricardo recognised him with a start of
surprise. He was a young Englishman, Harry Wethermill, who, after
a brilliant career at Oxford and at Munich, had so turned his
scientific genius to account that he had made a fortune for
himself at the age of twenty-eight.