Taber Tring gently removed the perfect arms which were already tightening about his neck. “I know who he is,” he said in a hard high tone. “That’s why I’ve been running away from him ever since early this morning.”
His good-humoured boyish face was absolutely decomposed by distress. Without vouchsafing the least attention to the Princess he stood pallidly but resolutely facing her visitor.
“I’ve been running for all I was worth; at least till a quarter of an hour ago. Then I suddenly pulled up short and said to myself: ‘Taber Tring, this won’t do. You were born in the Middle West, but your parents came from New England, and now’s the time to prove it if you’re ever going to. Stern and rockbound coast, and Mayflower and all the rest of it. If there’s anything in it, it ought to come out now.’ And, by George it did; and here I am, ready to make a clean breast of it.”
He drew a silk handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his brow, which was as damp with agony as the Professor’s.
But the Professor’s patience had reached its final limit, and he was determined, whatever happened, to hold all interrupters at bay till he had made a clean breast of his own.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said, “why you avoided my presence this morning nor why you now seek it; but since you are connected with this lady by so close a tie, there is no reason why I should not continue in your presence what I had begun to tell her. I repeat then, Madam, that with your hundred franc note in my hand, I approached a table and staked the sum with results so unexpectedly and incredibly favourable that I left the gaming-rooms just before midnight in possession of—”
“Ninety-nine thousand seven hundred francs and no centimes,” Taber Tring interposed.
The Professor received this with a gasp of astonishment; but everything which was happening was so foreign to all the laws of probability as experienced at Purewater that it did not long arrest his attention.
“You have stated the sum accurately,” he said; “but you do not know that I am no longer in possession of a penny of it.”
“Oh, don’t I?” groaned Taber Tring, wiping a fresh outbreak of moisture from his forehead.