"But it is to take five shillings from my pocket, that you should trump my ace. It is ridiculous that you should do that. If you do that, you shew you cannot play cards at all. It was my ace."
The rubber came to an end over this hand, and Dodo swiftly added up the score.
"Put it down, Nadine," she said. "We shall play to-morrow. We each of us owe eighty-two shillings."
The Prince adopted the more cumbrous system of adding up on his fingers, half-aloud, in German, but he agreed with the total.
"But I will be paid to-night," he said. "When I lose, I pay, when I am losed I am paid. And it should have been more. The Princess trumped my ace."
The entrance of a tray of refreshments luckily distracted his mind from this tragedy, and he rose.
"So I will eat," he said, "and then I will be paid eighty-two marks. I should be rich if every evening I won eighty-two marks. I should give the Princess more pin-money. But I will fly to eat, Lady Chesterford. That was your joke: that I shall tell Willie, but not about his music."
Dodo took the Princess up to her room, followed by her maid who carried a tray with some cold soup and strawberries on it.
"Such a pleasant evening, dear," she said. "Ah, there is some cold soup: so good, so nourishing. This year I think we shall stop in England till the review at Kiel, when we go with Willie. So glorious! The Cherman fleet so glorious, and the English fleet so glorious. What do you say, Marie? A little box? How did the little box come here? What does it say? Vane's patent soap-box."