As a non-participant in its profits and losses, fevers and frenzies, it had that stage effect upon his imagination which is usually exercised over those who behold Chance presented to them with spectacular piquancy without advancing far enough in its acquaintance to suffer from its ghastly reprisals and impish tricks.

He beheld a hundred diametrically opposed wishes issuing from the murky intelligences around a table, and spreading down across each other upon the figured diagram in their midst, each to its own number.

It was a network of hopes; which at the announcement, 'Sept, Rouge, Impair, et Manque,' disappeared like magic gossamer, to be replaced in a moment by new.

That all the people there, including himself, could be interested in what to the eye of perfect reason was a somewhat monotonous thing--the property of numbers to recur at certain longer or shorter intervals in a machine containing them--in other words, the blind groping after fractions of a result the whole of which was well known--was one testimony among many of the powerlessness of logic when confronted with imagination.
At this juncture our lounger discerned at one of the tables about the last person in the world he could have wished to encounter there.

It was Dare, whom he had supposed to be a thousand miles off, hanging about the purlieus of Markton.
Dare was seated beside a table in an attitude of application which seemed to imply that he had come early and engaged in this pursuit in a systematic manner.