"Well now," said the Colonel, rousing himself from a brief nirvana of digestion, "I hope that you will not be dull." He said it with the confidence of a man who has just laid before you a pretty convincing sample of his social powers.

Durant started; he was alone with the Colonel and the wine, and had just made the discovery that when the Colonel\'s face was at rest he was very like an owl.

"To-morrow we\'ll go exploring together. I should like to take you over my little property."

As a matter of fact, the property was considerable; but Durant noticed that its owner applied the endearing diminutive to every object that appealed specially to his egotism. It was a peculiarity of the Colonel that he was ready to melt with affection over the things that belonged to himself, and was roused almost to ferocity by whatever interested other people.

"I dare say it will be good for you to see some fresh faces and to be put—in touch—in touch with fresh ideas."

You would have said that Durant had been sitting for seven years with his feet on the fender while the Colonel roamed the world.

Durant agreed. He was being hypnotized by the hooked nose and the round hazel eyes with their radiating wrinkles. He had been five hours in Coton Manor, it felt like five years, and the evening had only just begun.

His host stared at him, fidgeted nervously for five minutes, plunged into nirvana again, emerged, and with a shamefaced smile suggested that the ladies [Pg 237] would be getting impatient. In the drawing-room his nervousness increased; he went on like a person distracted with an intolerable desire; he sat down and got up again; he pirouetted; he played with ornaments; he wandered uneasily about the room, opening and shutting windows, setting pictures straight, and lighting candles; he was a most uncomfortable little Colonel of militia. And with every movement he revolved nearer and nearer to a certain table. The table stood in the background; Durant recognized it as the kind that opens and discloses the magic circle, the green land of whist. The table had a sweet and sinful fascination for the Colonel.

Durant had just pulled himself together, and determined that he could bear it if they didn\'t play some infernal game, if they didn\'t play whist. And now it seemed that whist was what they played, that whist of course was what Mrs. Fazakerly was there for. The Colonel looked from the table to the group, from the group to the table; there was calculation in his eye, an almost sensual anticipation. He seemed to be saying to himself, "One, two, three, four; the perfect number." Durant affected abstraction, and turning to the window gazed out into the dim green landscape. His host\'s eye followed him; it marked him down as the fourth; it hovered round him, dubious, vacillating, troubled. The Colonel had still some torturing remnants of a conscience; he had read the deep repugnance on the young man\'s face, and hesitated to sacrifice a guest on his first night. He turned helplessly to Mrs. Fazakerly, who put an end to his struggle.

She touched Durant lightly on the shoulder. "Come," she murmured gently, like a fate that pitied while she compelled. "Come. He wants his little game."

It was as if she had said, "My poor dear sacrificial [Pg 238] lamb, he wants his little holocaust. There is no help for it. Let me show you the way to the altar."

"Frida!" It was the Colonel who spoke.

Miss Tancred spread open the table with the air of a high priestess, hieratic and resigned. The Colonel approached it, a lighted candle in each hand. For one moment of time the egotist seemed to be rapt beyond himself; he was serving the great god Whist. Cards were the Colonel\'s passion; he loved them with delight that was madness, madness that was delight. Cards for cards\' sake, the pure passion, the high, immaculate abstraction; no gambling, mind you; no playing for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement. With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism; but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent, the science of sciences, Whist.

Durant curled his long legs under the table and prepared for a miserable evening, while the Colonel\'s face beamed on him from between two candles.

"Durant," he said, "you are an acquisition. If it wasn\'t for you we should have to play with a dummy."

Durant replied mournfully that he was not great at the game, but he thought he was about as good as a dummy.

"Don\'t you be too sure of that," said Mrs. Fazakerly. "There\'s a great deal to be said for the dummy. He isn\'t frivolous, he never revokes, he never loses his little temper, and he plays the game."

"Yes, I think he can show you some very pretty science, Durant." The Colonel\'s mustache and eyebrows and all the wrinkles on his face were agitated, but he made no sound. The owl was pluming all his little feathers, was fluttering with mysterious mirth. [Pg 239] Oh! he took the lady\'s humor, he could enter into the thing, he could keep the ball going.

"You see," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "he has an intelligence behind him."

"A dummy inspired by Colonel Tancred would be terrible to encounter," said Durant.

Miss Tancred lifted her eyes from the cards she was shuffling. Again he felt her gaze resting upon him for a moment, the same comprehensive, disconcerting gaze. This time it had something pathetic and appealing in it, as if she implored him to take no further notice of her father\'s fatuity.

"Confound the old fellow," he said to himself; "why does he make me say these things?"

When they began Durant saw a faint hope of release in his own stupidity, his obvious unfitness for the game. By a studied carelessness, an artful exaggeration of his deficiencies, he courted humiliation, ejection in favor of the dummy. But, as it happened, either his evil destiny had endowed him with her own detestable skill, or else his stupidity was supreme. Trying with might and main to lose, he kept on winning with horrible persistency. He was on the winning side; he was made one with the terrible Miss Tancred; and for the first half hour he found a certain painful interest in watching that impenetrable creature.

Miss Tancred played the game; she played, now with the rhythm and precision of a calculating machine, now with the blind impetus and swoop of some undeviating natural force. It was not will, it was not intelligence; it was something beyond and above them both, infinitely more detached, more monotonous and cold; something independent even of her desire. Durant could see that she had as little love for the game as he had. She played because she always had played, by [Pg 240] habit, a second nature that had ousted the first. Her skill was so unerring that for Durant it robbed the game............