"Draw!" she commanded, holding out the pack; and Plank drew a diamond.
"Naturally," she nodded, shuffling the pack with her smooth, savant fingers and laying them out as she repeated the formula: "Qui frappe?
Qui entre?
Qui prend chaise?
Qui parle?
Oh, the deuce! it's always the same! Tiens! je m'ennui!" There was a flash of her bare arm, a flutter, and the cards fell in a shower over them both.
Plank flipped a card from his knee, laughing uncertainly, aware of symptoms in his pretty vis-a-vis which always made him uncomfortable.
For months, now, at certain intervals, these recurrent symptoms had made him wary; but what they might portend he did not know, only that, alone with her, moments occurred when he was heavily aware of a tension which, after a while, affected even his few thick nerves.

One of those intervals was threatening now: her flushed cheeks, her feverish activity with her hands, the unconscious reflex movement of her silken knees and restless slippers, all foreboded it.

Next would come the nervous laughter, the swift epigram which bored and puzzled him, the veiled badinage he was unequal to; and then the hint of weariness, the curious pathos of long silences, the burnt-out beauty of her eyes from which the fire had gone as though quenched by invisible tears within.
He ascribed it--desired to ascribe it--to her relations with her husband.

He had naturally learned and divined how matters stood with them; he had learned considerable in the last month or two--something of Mortimer's record as a burly brother to the rich; something of his position among those who made no question of his presence anywhere.
Something of Leila, too, he had heard, or rather deduced from hinted word or shrug or smiling silence, not meant for him, but indifferent to what he might hear and what he might think of what he heard.
He did listen; he did patiently add two and two in the long solitudes of his Louis XV chamber; and if the results were not always four, at least they came within a fraction of the proper answer.

And this did not alter his policy or weaken his faith in his mentors; nor did it impair his real gratitude to them, and his real and simple friendship for them both.