When she at length returned to Felix and, squeezing through the outer rings of gladiators against chance, touched him delicately on the shoulder, he faced her with a bright youthful smile, and without any surprise--it was plain to her that he had recognized her from the light touch of her finger.
"Do you want me to stop?"
She nodded.
He gathered his counters together and rose with alacrity.
"You came in the nick of time," he said. "But, of course, you would! I've been playing wild and I've made a thousand francs into rather more than six thousand. It was the very moment to flee from the wrath that was coming. Let's run, run, to the change-desk before I change my mind and decide to begin to lose. That's the only insurance--getting rid of the counters, because when you've got rid of 'em you're too ashamed with yourself to get more."
He was quite uplifted, so gaily preoccupied with his achievement that he noticed nothing strange in her mien. She was glad that he noticed nothing; and yet also she was sorry; she would have liked him, after a single glance at her, to have said in his curt, quiet, assured manner: "What's wrong?"
She kept thinking, but not of Felix: "He must be very fickle and capricious. I'm certain he was making love to her. He happens to see me and off he runs after me! He can't be any good, with his debts and things. I was right to give him the bird. But he's terribly nice, and I don't care. I don't know what on earth's the matter with me. I think I must be a bit mad, and always was. If I wasn't, should I be here?"
Transiently she viewed herself as, for example, Gertie Jackson would have viewed her. And then she saw another and a worse self and viewed that other self as Lilian the staid and constant friend of Felix would naturally view such an abandoned girl. She was afraid of and disgusted by the possibilities discovered in the depths of her own mind.
At the desk the dancing girl whom Felix had indicated as inhabiting their hotel hurried up passionately and forestalled them. She threw down two green counters, as it were in anger.
"Can I play with that!" she exclaimed in cockney English.