luck, that was all. Anyhow, in Mellish's rooms you could have a quiet,
gentlemanly game for stakes about as high as you cared to go, and you
were reasonably sure there would be no fuss and that your name would
not appear in the papers next morning.

One night as Mellish cast his eye around his well-filled main room he
noticed a stranger sitting at the roulette table. Mellish had a keen
eye for strangers and in an unobtrusive way generally managed to find
out something about them. A stranger in a gambling room brings in with
him a certain sense of danger to the habitués.

"Who is that boy?" whispered Mellish to his bartender, generally known
as Sotty, an ex-prize fighter and a dangerous man to handle if it came
to trouble. It rarely came to trouble there, but Sotty was, in a
measure, the silent symbol of physical force, backing the well-known
mild morality of Mellish.

"I don't know him," answered Sotty.

"Whom did he come in with?"

"I didn't see him come in. Hadn't noticed him till now."

Mellish looked at the boy for a few minutes. He had the fresh, healthy,
smooth face of a lad from the country, and he seemed strangely out of
place in the heated atmosphere of that room, under the glare of the
gas. Mellish sighed as he looked at him, then he turned to Sotty and
said:

"Just get him away quietly and bring him to the small poker room. I