‘I’m terribly afraid you’re rubiconed,’ I said, adding up the score for the third time.

‘Well,’ he replied, glancing sidelong at my figures, ‘I shall hope to do the same by you before the evening’s out.’

Hope stirred in me. Was there to be a show-down? His words had an ominous ring: last night we had been more jubilant under defeat.

‘I shall not grudge you the last laugh,’ I said, looking at him hard.

He laughed then, and rather bitterly, I thought.

‘It will be a new experience for me.’

‘Oh, surely,’ I protested. In vision I saw a series of week-end campaigns, lightning successes without a check; I saw too the casualties privately wringing their hands.

‘You held all the cards,’ he said, still a little resentful.

‘Oh, did I?’ I replied, and added, ‘But it was my misfortune. I’m so sorry.’

He took up the cards.

‘Should we cut?’

‘I think we might.’

‘After you, then.’

At length, all preliminary conditions satisfied, the game once more got under way.

‘And I’ve a quatorze of Kings, the whole phalanx,’ I heard my host say. It was the coup-de-grâce. I was ‘repiqued’.

‘Ninety-five,’ he announced.

‘Nothing.’

‘Ninety-six.’

‘Nothing.’

He played the cards almost vindictively, winning all the tricks and ‘capotting’ me. Again I noticed in his tone signs of excitement and satisfaction that were a betrayal of our code. We had taken our triumphs sadly.

‘With forty that makes you a hundred and forty-six,’ I said, ‘and nothing for me, poor me.’ I felt that, in view of his elation, I was entitled to a syllable of self-pity.

‘You’ve forgotten the last trick,’ he reminded me. ‘I had to work for it. That’s a hundred and forty-seven, please. And why “poor you”?’

I was still smarting under the ‘please’, trying to explain it away as ironical, when he repeated the question.

‘Why “poor you”?’

I really had to think. It would have been much easier simply to be annoyed.

‘Because I got nothing, I suppose,’ I said lamely. I thought it a sufficient explanation for a casual word, and even remarkably good-tempered. But it had an unsettling effect on Oswald. He rose and went to the fireplace.

‘But you have everything!’ he brought out at last. ‘Everything!’

Like a bankrupt and with the unenviable sensations of a bankrupt, I went over my meagre property, personal and real. The only considerable asset I had appeared to be my investment, my shares in the ‘concern’ that was Oswald—and then I was going to lose, had already lost. He couldn’t possibly—it was too heartless, be poking fun at my imminent destitution. He couldn’t seriously mean me to give him a financial statement—an outline of my ‘circumstances’. That they were straitened was common property—the only sort of property, in fact, in which they at all generously abounded. Judged by any standard the disparity in our fortunes was tremendous and the advantages all his. It was my luck with the cards, I decided, that had set growling the green-eyed monster, which must have slumbered since its owner’s childhood. And this was a childish outburst, a childish solecism which I would overlook.

‘I’ve been horribly lucky,’ I said, looking up at him. ‘I’ve won all along the line. And I won last night too.’

I had, a paltry hundred.

He laughed and returned to his chair.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did. But I wasn’t meaning that.’ His face narrowed over the cards.

What, then, did he mean? I longed to ask; and last night, fortified by toddy, perhaps I could have asked. But the interval had choked that weakling, our intimacy, beneath a jungle of misunderstanding and constraint. I could no more ask the question than an actor could show himself aware of a conventional aside spoken well within his hearing. And if the saving mood failed me then, the next morning at breakfast, a breakfast that looked so earnestly into the future that it seemed to have outrun the present and be taking place at the station or even in the train—this mood had faded into the shadow of a dream. I had ceased to take pains, ceased even to cling. I suppose I cut an awkward figure, realizing that if I didn’t stand on my dignity I didn’t stand at all. And it was from this pedestal, and not from the horns of Friendship’s altar, that I waved Oswald Clayton good bye.

As far as London allowed of it, I passed the week that followed my visit to Witheling End in seclusion. There was little to distract me. The cheerful or distinguished gatherings in which, as Oswald’s familiar, I had been welcome were closed to me; and I hadn’t the heart to ogle the other scarecrows of older standing, with which Oswald’s waste ground had been so thickly planted. Dully I realized that outlets were stopped up; but even if I were robbed of motion, socially paralysed, I could still hug my immobility and postpone the moment when I too must flap and twirl for a warning to the rest. And so it was with sinking of the heart that I heard a bounding step on the stairs followed by a resounding voice. It was Ponting, the artist.

‘Ha!’ he said, drawing a fold of the window-curtain on to the table and sitting on it. ‘What are you doing here, with a face as long as three wet days?’ He had a vigorous vocabulary and his work was exuberantly morbid.

‘I pass away the time,’ I said.

‘You should have been where I’ve come from,’ he proclaimed. ‘Then you wouldn’t be looking like a candidate for confirmation.’ I disliked his tone, and felt little interest in the place that had made him what he was; but he forestalled my inquiry.

‘I’ve been at Witheling End.’

‘Why,’ I exclaimed in spite of myself, ‘I was there a week ago!’

‘And didn’t you enjoy it?’ he demanded.

‘If you mean in the sense that one enjoys poor health,’ I replied, ‘I enjoyed it immensely. Frankly, I loathed every minute of it.’

He examined me curiously, as though I had some disease.

‘Well!’ he declared. ‘You are a comical character.’

‘I didn’t amuse Oswald,’ I said.

At that he laughed aloud, slipped off the table and danced up and down the room chanting:

‘He’s one of Oswald’s misfits! He’s one of Oswald’s misfits!’

‘Tell me the secret of your success,’ I said, fascinated by his ungainly antics. ‘I suppose you fitted like a glove.’

My friend struck an attitude.

‘It was bone to his bone,’ he assured me.

I tried to visualize this composite skeleton.

‘When I arrived,’ he went on, ‘the place felt unhome-like. Oswald wanted to wrap me up in cotton-wool. But I soon put the lid on that.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘I waited till we were alone,’ said Ponting. His face wore a puzzled expression, as though he were inwardly marvelling at his own astuteness, and he spoke slowly and emphatically, studying the exits and apertures of my room, anxious to bring home to me, by pantomime, the very scent and savour of his discretion.

‘Yes?’ I said.

He looked at me hard, to make sure I had taken it in.

‘I waited till we were alone,’ he repeated, ‘and when we were alone I just touched him on the shoulder like that. Nothing more.’

He gave me a heavy pat. The ‘more’, from which he had refrained, would certainly have been a knock-down blow.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘and then?’

‘He seemed surprised,’ Ponting said, ‘so I drew him aside——’

‘But you told me you were alone,’ I objected.

‘I drew him aside,’ Ponting went on, ‘and said, “Now that we’re between ourselves, there’s something I want to say to you,” and Oswald said “Say on!” or something like that. I think it was “say on” he said.’

‘And what did you say?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t want to be heavy about it,’ Ponting remarked carelessly. ‘I said, “A truce to all this palaver. I shan’t melt, Oswald, and I shan’t break. There’s no need to treat me like a Vestal Virgin.” That was all; but it did the trick.’