At The Villa Rose

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.