Constance wondered why she had come. Was she, too, trying to warn a newcomer against the place!
She said nothing, but now that the effort had been made and the little woman had gone actually so far, she felt the reaction. She sank down into an easy chair and rested her pretty head on her delicately gloved hand.
"Oh, Mrs. Dunlap," she began convulsively, "I hope you will pardon an entire stranger for breaking in on you so informally—but—but I can't—I can't help it. I must tell some one."
Accustomed as she was now to strange confidences, Constance bent over and patted the little hand of Mrs. Noble comfortingly.
"You seemed to take it so coolly," went on the other woman. "For me the glamour, the excitement are worse than champagne. But you could stop, even when you were winning. Oh, my God! What am I to do? What will happen when my husband finds out what I have done!"
Tearfully, the little woman poured out the sordid story of her fascination for the game, of her losses, of the pawning of her jewels to pay her losses and keep them secret, if only for a few days, until that mythical time when luck would change.
"When I started," she blurted out with a bitter little laugh, "I thought I'd make a little pin money. That's how I began—with that and the excitement. And now this is the end."
She had risen and was pacing the floor wildly.
"Mrs. Dunlap," she cried, pausing before Constance, "to-day I am nothing more nor less than a 'capper,' as they call it, for a gambling resort."
She was almost hysterical. The contrast with the gay, respectable, prosperous-looking woman at Bella's was appalling. Constance realized to the full what were the tragedies that were enacted elsewhere.