With nine players, the game was crowded, and Graham, rather than draw cards, casually and occasionally backed Ernestine’s cards, the while he glanced down the long room at the violinist and Paula Forrest absorbed in Beethoven Symphonies and Delibes’ Ballets. Jeremy Braxton was demanding raising the limit to twenty cents, and Dick, the heaviest loser, as he averred, to the tune of four dollars and sixty cents, was plaintively suggesting the starting of a “kitty” in order that some one should pay for the lights and the sweeping out of the place in the morning, when Graham, with a profound sigh at the loss of his last bet—a nickel which he had had to pay double—announced to Ernestine that he was going to take a turn around the room to change his luck.
“I prophesied you would,” she told him under her breath.
“What?” he asked.
She glanced significantly in Paula’s direction.
“Just for that I simply must go down there now,” he retorted.
“Can’t dast decline a dare,” she taunted.
“If it were a dare I wouldn’t dare do it.”
“In which case I dare you,” she took up.
He shook his head: “I had already made up my mind to go right down there to that one spot and cut that fiddler out of the running. You can’t dare me out of it at this late stage. Besides, there’s Mr. O’Hay waiting for you to make your bet.”
Ernestine rashly laid ten cents, and scarcely knew whether she won or lost, so intent was she on watching Graham go down the room, although she did know that Bert Wainwright had not been unobservant of her gaze and its direction. On the other hand, neither she nor Bert, nor any other at the table, knew that Dick’s quick-glancing eyes, sparkling with merriment while his lips chaffed absurdities that made them all laugh, had missed no portion of the side play.