it possible you could know--and be able to repeat the whole of the
conversation I had with Walter Le-Grand, to whom I lost so heavily
last night? Tell me, how do you know all this?"

But Kelson would tell her nothing--nothing beyond her own sins and
misfortunes.

"I have nothing to give you," she told him. "I dare not ask my husband
for more money."

"What, nothing!" Kelson replied, "When the pawnbroker has just
advanced you fifty thousand dollars. You call that nothing? Be pleased
to give me one thousand, and congratulate yourself that I do not ask
for all your 'nothing.'" And as neither tears nor prayers had any
effect, she was obliged to pay him the sum he asked.

Flushed and excited with victory, and thinking, perhaps, that he had
done enough for one day, Kelson took his spoils to a bank near the
Palace Hotel, and for the first time in his career opened a banking
account. As he was leaving the building he ran into Hamar, bent on a
similar errand. The two gleefully compared notes.

"I thought," Hamar said, "my turn would never come, and that I must
have done something to get out of favour with the Unknown; but as I
was sitting in the Pig and Whistle Saloon in Corn Street drinking a
lager, I suddenly felt a peculiar throbbing sensation run up my left
leg into my left hand, and the floor seemed to open up, and I saw deep
below me, in a black pit, a skeleton clutching hold of a linen bag,
full of coins. I could see the gold quite distinctly--Spanish doubles,
none newer than the eighteenth century. I knew then that the Unknown