A few were still playing, but the majority were watching the play of Lady Kathleen, and it dawned on Westerham that she was waging a losing fight with the bank.
Her face and figure were in extraordinary contrast to her surroundings. She was, besides, the only woman in the room.
Draped in a long opera cloak from which her bare arms were thrust, she sat forward eagerly in her chair, her lips trembling, her eyes bright as stars.
On either side of her sat a sturdy and rather roughly-dressed man, who took no part in the play. Westerham imagined that they were employees of Melun, stationed there for the purpose of ensuring Lady Kathleen against any molestation or insult.
Such a protection was entirely unnecessary, for every man in the room appeared to feel that he was in the presence of one who not only had the right, but the power, to command respect. In spite of her incongruous surroundings, and in spite of her extraordinary occupation of the moment, the coarse faces by which she was surrounded surveyed her with a certain marked and almost sheepish deference.
As the game went on and the croupier monotonously raked in the winnings of the bank, Westerham suddenly divined the motive which had induced Melun to send him there to watch Lady Kathleen play.
He did not know why she played, nor what the real stake might be, but one thing was obvious—that after he entered the room and she had caught sight of his face her luck suddenly changed. She had been greatly alarmed and distressed; so disconcerted, indeed, that for a few minutes she apparently lost all track of the successful theory which she had been following. And Westerham knew well enough that if a good player once becomes unnerved, his luck, for some strange reason, will change with his mood, and no efforts, however bold or desperate, will avail him anything.
It amazed Westerham beyond measure that Lady Kathleen could play such a game with so consummate a skill and so much evidence of experience. He judged that her father at some time or other had let her have a little fling at Monte Carlo, and that profiting by such knowledge as she had acquired there she had now been playing an inspired game for some incalculable stake.
Westerham imagined, too, that it had probably been Melun's brutal fancy to drag the girl there on the promise that if she won against the bank he would release her father from his torment; no other theory was possible.
And it made his heart grow cold with rage as he appreciated the fiendish cleverness with which Melun had engineered his entrance at a critical moment. Westerham had been made the innocent instrument of utter disaster to Kathleen.