"Never mind that. It shan't cost you anything. Now I am going to make a clean breast of it, as you English call it; though why there should be anything dirty in keeping your own secrets I don't know. I want to make an experiment with you."
"Give me chloroform, and cut me up?" said Tom, reviving as his quarrel with Lucy withdrew a little into the background.
"Not quite that. You shall neither take chloroform, nor have your eyes bandaged, nor be tied to the table. You can go the moment you have had enough of it. It is merely for the sake of my theory. Entirely an experiment."
"Perhaps, if you told me your theory, I might judge of the nature of the experiment."
"I told you all about it the other day. You are one of those fortunate mortals doomed to be lucky. Why, I knew one—not a gambler, I don't mean that—whose friends at last would have nothing to do with him where any chance was concerned. If it was only sixpenny points, they wouldn't play a single rubber of whist with him except he was their partner. In fact, the poor wretch was reduced to play only with strangers,—comparative strangers I mean, of course. He won everything."
"Then what do you want with me? Out with it."
"I only want to back you. You don't understand the thing. You shan't spend a farthing. I have plenty." Here Molken pulled a few sovereigns from his pocket as he went on, and it never occurred to Tom to ask how he had them, seeing he was so hard-up at dinner-time. "It's all for my theory of luck, I assure you. I have given up practical gambling, as I told you, long ago. It's not right. I have known enough about it, I confess to you—you know we understand each other; but I confess too—my theory—I am anxious about that."
All this time they had been walking along, Thomas paying no heed to the way they went. He would have known little about it, however, well as he thought he knew London, for they had entered a region entirely unknown to him.
"But you haven't told me, after all," he said, "where you are going."
"Here," answered Molken, pushing open the swing-door of a public-house.