But you promise not to play another game now ?" "My dear, I will promise that with pleasure.

Only do please be off about your business." The rector was a most inveterate and insatiable chess-player.

In the household, rather than by it, he was, as a matter of lofty belief, supposed to be deeply engaged with theology, or magisterial questions of almost equal depth, or (to put it at the lowest) parochial affairs, the while he was solidly and seriously engaged in getting up the sound defense to some Continental gambit.

And this, not only to satisfy himself upon some point of theory, but from a nearer and dearer point of view--for he never did like to be beaten.
At present he was laboring to discover the proper defense to a new and slashing form of the Algaier gambit, by means of which Robin Lyth had won every game in which he had the move, upon their last encounter.
The great free-trader, while a boy, had shown an especial aptitude for chess, and even as a child he had seemed to know the men when first, by some accident, he saw them.

The rector being struck by this exception to the ways of childhood--whose manner it is to take chess-men for "dollies," or roll them about like nine-pins--at once included in the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of elemental doctrine in the one true game.