“Hush! hush!” he warned, finger on lip. “Not here! Do not forget my instructions.” Then, in his low, mock-gallant accents: “How now? Is the game, then, no longer worth the hazard?”
She caught up the dice-box again, feverishly:—
“Yes—yes. But I have no luck to-night!”
She muttered and cast. “Naught again!”
“Expect you luck at the game of chance,” quoth he, catching the dice-box from her hand, “when you are so lucky at the game of love?”
“I? I, lucky?”
“Yes,” proceeded he; “and have you not had Cupid’s best cards in your hand, since the very hour of your landing with Madame de France? First the King—King of Trumps himself, and eke the Queen.—Gad, she’d have loved you, were it but to spite the Castlemaine.—Then—”
“Tush!” she interrupted angrily. “Cards?—’Tis not all to hold the cards—one must play them. I held them all, in truth—” she put her hand to her throat with a little choking sob. “But—”
“You threw them all down!” he laughed.