ourselves shall be broken--and we shall deserve it.

MRS. G. You think that--possible?

MORLEY. I would rather not think anything just now. The game is over; I
must be going. Good night, dear friend; and if you sleep only as well as
you deserve, I could wish you no better repose. Good-bye.

(_He moves toward the table from which the players are now rising_.)

GLADSTONE. That is a game, my dear Armitstead, which came to this country
nearly eight hundred years ago from the Crusades. Previously it had been
in vogue among the nomadic tribes of the Arabian desert for more than a
thousand years. Its very name, "backgammon," so English in sound, is but a
corruption from the two Arabic words _bacca_, and _gamma_ (my
pronunciation of which stands subject to correction), meaning--if I
remember rightly--"the board game." There, away East, lies its origin; its
first recorded appearance in Europe was at the Sicilian Court of the
Emperor Frederick II; and when the excommunication of Rome fell on him in
the year 1283, the game was placed under an interdict, which, during the
next four hundred years, was secretly but sedulously disregarded within
those impregnably fortified places of learning and piety, to which so much
of our Western civilisation is due, the abbeys and other scholastic
foundations of the Benedictine order. The book-form, in which the board
still conceals itself, stands as a memorial of its secretive preservation
upon the shelves of the monastic libraries. I keep my own, with a certain
touch of ritualistic observance, between this seventeenth century edition
of the works of Roger Bacon and this more modern one, in Latin, of the
writings of Thomas Aquinas; both of whom may not improbably have been
practitioners of the game.