“I thank your lordship, but I would prefer to throw against the bank,” replied Mr. Comyn, and sat down beside Lord Rupert Alastair.
Lord Carlisle, having done what he could to prevent his protégé from joining the table, shrugged fatalistically, and withdrew.
“Raise you to a hundred, gentlemen,” Vidal said, and lay back in his chair, feeling in his capacious coat-pocket for his snuff-box. He pulled it out, and opened it, and took a pinch, flashing a quick look round the table. A gentleman in puce satin, and a very large stock buckle, protested that fifty was deep enough.
Mr. Fox lifted weary eyebrows, and stretched out his hand for Vidal’s snuff-box. He regarded it closely, and remarked with a sigh: “Le Sueur. Email en plain. Very pretty. A hundred, I think you said?” He put it down and picked up the dice-box.
Someone at the other end of the table said that the game went too deep, but was overruled.
“Standing out, Cholmondley?” asked the Marquis.
“By God, I’m not, then! You’ve too many of my notes under your hand, Vidal. Keep it at fifty.”
“Raising you to a hundred,” the Marquis repeated.
Mr. Fox took the dice. “A hundred it is, and those afraid of it stand out,” he drawled. He called a main of eight and threw fives. “Rot you, Vidal,” he said good-humouredly, and scribbled his name on a slip of paper, and pushed it across the table.
The red-faced gentleman seated midway down the table opposite Lord Rupert Alastair looked under his brows at the Marquis, and said loud enough to be heard: “I’d say it was time another man held the bank. This is a damned one-sided game.”