Shall we ?" Condy remembered that he had no money.

"I'm flat broke, Tracy," he announced, for he knew Sargeant well enough to make the confession without wincing.

"No, I'll not get in; but I'll go up and watch you a few minutes." They ascended to the card-room, where the air was heavy and acrid with cigar smoke, and where the silence was broken only by the click of poker-chips.

At the end of twenty minutes Condy was playing, having borrowed enough money of Sargeant to start him in the game.
Unusually talkative and restless, he had suddenly hardened and stiffened to a repressed, tense calm; speechless, almost rigid in his chair.

Excitable under even ordinary circumstances, his every faculty was now keyed to its highest pitch.