Besides, the Colonel had one weakness--sometimes he did a little gambling, and when he played he liked to play fairly high.

Morris accompanied him once to the "Salles de jeu," and--that was enough.

What passed there exactly, could never be got out of him, even by Mary, whose sense of humour was more than satisfied with the little comedies in progress about her, no single point of which did she ever miss.
Only, funny as she might be in her general feebleness, and badly as she might have behaved in some distant past, for Lady Rawlins she felt sorry.

Her kind heart told Mary that this unhappy person also possessed a heart, although she was now stout and on the wrong side of middle age.
She was aware, too, that the Colonel knew as much, and his scientific pin-pricks and searings of that guileless and unprotected organ struck her as little short of cruel.

None the less so, indeed, because the victim at the stake imagined that they were inflicted in kindness by the hand of a still tender and devoted friend.
"I hope that I shan't quarrel with my father-in-law," reflected Mary to herself, after one of the best of these exhibitions; "he's got an uncommonly long memory, and likes to come even.