"The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. They had twirled
the little ivory ball and swept the stakes from the table. All that
remained was the man and woman gazing into each other's cold eyes. And
then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was dead--
you remember the accident. And in her diary, written at this time, I long
afterward read Mitchell Kennerly's:--

"'There was not a single hour
We might have kissed and did not kiss.'"

"Oh, the irony of it!" I cried out.

And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet
jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.

"And they won, you said? The world's judgment! I have told you, and I
know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills."

"But you," I demanded hotly; "you with your orgies of sound and sense, with
your mad cities and madder frolics--bethink you that you win?"

He shook his head slowly. "Because you with your sober bucolic regime,
lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think we
win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods."



THE APOSTATE

"Now I wake me up to work;