"I did in a raffle, once."
"Well?"
"I won a picture."
"I told you so! And it would be just the same whatever you tried. You are cut out for it. You have the luck-mark on you. I was sure of it."
"How can you tell that?" asked Tom, lingering like a fly over the sweet poison, and ready to swallow almost any absurdity that represented him as something different from the ran of ordinary mortals, of whom he was, as yet at least, a very ordinary specimen.
"Never you mind how I can tell. But I will tell you this much, that I have experience; and your own Bacon says that the laws of everything are to be found out by observation and experiment. I have observed, and I have experimented, and I tell you you are a lucky one."
Tom stroked the faintest neutrality of a coming mustache, ponderingly and pleasedly, and said nothing.
"By the by, are you coming to me to-night?" asked Molken.
"No—o," answered Tom, still stroking his upper lip with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, "I think not. I believe I have an engagement to-night, somewhere or other."