"No, no; I've got to work to-night," asserted Condy.

After dinner, while they were smoking their cigars in a window of
the main room, one of the hall-boys came up and touched Condy on
the arm.

"Mr. Eckert, and Mr. Hendricks, and Mr. George Hands, and several
other of those gentlemen are up in the card-room, and are asking
for you and Mr. Sargeant."

"Why, I didn't know the boys were here! They've got a game going,
Condy. Let's go up and get in. Shall we?"

Condy remembered that he had no money. "I'm flat broke, Tracy,"
he announced, for he knew Sargeant well enough to make the
confession without wincing. "No, I'll not get in; but I'll go up
and watch you a few minutes."

They ascended to the card-room, where the air was heavy and acrid
with cigar smoke, and where the silence was broken only by the
click of poker-chips. At the end of twenty minutes Condy was
playing, having borrowed enough money of Sargeant to start him in
the game.

Unusually talkative and restless, he had suddenly hardened and
stiffened to a repressed, tense calm; speechless, almost rigid in
his chair. Excitable under even ordinary circumstances, his every
faculty was now keyed to its highest pitch. The nervous strain
upon him was like the stretching and tightening of harp-strings,