Send answer by this messenger." He got his answer within three-quarters of an hour, and left the club as Hendricks and George Hands arrived by the elevator entrance.
Sitting in the bay window of the dining-room, he told Blix why he had come.
"Oh, you were right!" she told him.

"Always, ALWAYS come, when--when you feel you must." "It gets so bad sometimes, Blix," he confessed with abject self-contempt, "that when I can't get some one to play against I'll sit down and deal dummy hands, and bet on them.

Just the touch of the cards--just the FEEL of the chips.

Faugh! it's shameful." The day following, Sunday, Condy came to tea as usual; and after the meal, as soon as the family and Victorine had left the pair alone in the dining-room, they set about preparing for their morrow's excursion.
Blix put up their lunch--sandwiches of what Condy called "devilish" ham, hard-boiled eggs, stuffed olives, and a bottle of claret.
Condy took off his coat and made a great show of stringing the tackle: winding the lines from the spools on to the reels, and attaching the sinkers and flies to the leaders, smoking the while, and scowling fiercely.

He got the lines fearfully and wonderfully snarled, he caught the hooks in the table-cloth, he lost the almost invisible gut leaders on the floor and looped the sinkers on the lines when they should have gone on the leaders.