A shudder passed through the circle, for the uncanny face and the weird utterance had the strange reality of fate. A gloom fell on the gamblers suddenly, and they slowly drew into a group, looking half furtively at one another.
The wheel turned on the roulette-table, the ball clattered.
"Rien ne va plus!" called the croupier; but no coins had fallen on the green cloth, and the wheel stopped spinning for the night, as though by common consent.
"Krool will murder you some day, Barry," said Fleming, with irritation. "What's the sense in saying things like that to a servant?"
"How long ago did Rudyard leave?" asked De Lancy Scovel, curiously. "I didn't see him go. He didn't say good-night to me. Did he to you—to any of you?"
"Yes, he said to me he was going," rejoined Barry Whalen.
"And to me," said Melville, the Pole, who in the early days on the Rand had been a caterer. His name then had been Joseph Sobieski, but this not fitting well with the English language, he had searched the directory of London till he found the impeachably English combination of Clifford Melville. He had then cut his hair and put himself into the hands of a tailor in Conduit Street, and they had turned him into—what he was.
"Yes, Byng thed good-night to me—deah old boy," he repeated. "'I'm so damned thleepy, and I have to be up early in the morning,' he thed to me."
"Byng's example's good enough. I'm off," said Fleming, stretching up his arms and yawning.
"Byng ought to get up earlier in the morning—much earlier," interposed De Lancy Scovel, with a meaning note in his voice.