“Someone at the door, Jeeves,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

He opened the door, and in popped Aline Hemmingway and her brother. The last person I had expected. I really had thought that I could be alone for a minute in my own room.

“Oh, hallo!” I said.

“Oh, Mr. Wooster!” said the girl in a gasping sort of way. “I don’t know how to begin.”

Then I noticed that she appeared considerably rattled, and as for the brother, he looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.

This made me sit up a bit and take notice. I had supposed that this was just a social call, but apparently something had happened to give them a jolt. Though I couldn’t see why they should come to me about it.

“Is anything up?” I said.

“Poor Sidney—it was my fault—I ought never to have let him go there alone,” said the girl. Dashed agitated.

At this point the brother, who after shedding a floppy overcoat and parking his hat on a chair had been standing by wrapped in the silence, gave a little cough, like a sheep caught in the mist on a mountain top.

“The fact is, Mr. Wooster,” he said, “a sad, a most deplorable thing has occurred. This afternoon, while you were so kindly escorting my sist-ah, I found the time hang a little heavy upon my hands and I was tempted to—ah—gamble at the Casino.”

I looked at the man in a kindlier spirit than I had been able to up to date. This evidence that he had sporting blood in his veins made him seem more human, I’m bound to say. If only I’d known earlier that he went in for that sort of thing, I felt that we might have had a better time together.

“Oh!” I said. “Did you click?”

He sighed heavily.

“If you mean was I successful, I must answer in the negative. I rashly persisted in the view that the colour red, having appeared no fewer than seven times in succession, must inevitably at no distant date give place to black. I was in error. I lost my little all, Mr. Wooster.”

“Tough luck,” I said.

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