UNDER THE RED ROBE

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I.

 AT ZATON'S

 

"Marked cards!"

There were a score round us when the fool, little knowing the man with whom he had to deal, and as little how to lose like a gentleman, flung the words in my teeth. He thought, I'll be sworn, that I should storm and swear and ruffle it like any common cock of the hackle. But that was never Gil de Berault's way. For a few seconds after he had spoken I did not even look at him. I passed my eye instead--smiling, bien entendu--round the ring of waiting faces, saw that there was no one except De Pombal I had cause to fear; and then at last I rose and looked at the fool with the grim face I have known impose on older and wiser men.

"Marked cards, M. l'Anglais?" I said, with a chilling sneer. "They are used, I am told, to trap players--not unbirched schoolboys."

"Yet I say that they are marked!" he replied hotly, in his queer foreign jargon. "In my last hand I had nothing. You doubled the stakes. Bah, Sir, you knew! You have swindled me!"

"Monsieur is easy to swindle--when he plays with a mirror behind him," I 

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