Serracauld looked up quickly.
"What!" he exclaimed. "You don't play bridge?"
"I have never played any game of cards since I was a child."
The three men looked at her in unfeigned surprise.
"Not really, Mrs. Milbanke?"
Serracauld's eyes were wide with astonishment.
"Really !—quite really!"
"Why you are ethereal, Mrs. Milbanke," Barnard said laughingly, as the gondola glided up to the palace steps. "The passport to humanity nowadays is an inordinate love of risk."
Clodagh laughed nervously.
"Then I must be inhuman," she said.