to the very fullest. I look for the alliance with her to . . .'

He sprang up and traversed the room: 'We're all guilty of mistakes at
starting: I speak of men. Women are protected; and if they're not,
there's the convent for them, Feltre says. But a man has to live it on
before the world; and this life, with these flies of fellows . . .
I fell into it in some way. Absolutely like the first bird I shot as a
youngster, and stood over the battered head and bloody feathers,
wondering! There was Ambrose Mallard--the same splintered bones--blood
--come to his end; and for a woman; that woman the lady bearing the title
of half-mother to me. God help me! What are my sins? She feels
nothing, or about as much as the mortuary paragraph of the newspapers,
for the dead man; and I have Ambrose Mallard's look at her and St. Ombre
talking together, before he left the tent to cross the fields. Borrow,
beg, or steal for money to play for her! and not a glimpse of the winning
post.

St. Ombre 's a cool player; that 's at the bottom of the story. He's
cool because play doesn't bite him, as it did Ambrose. I should say the
other passion has never bitten him. And he's alive and presentable;
Ambrose under a sheet, with Chummy Potts to watch. Chummy cried like a
brat in the street for his lost mammy. I left him crying and sobbing.
They have their feelings, these "children of vapour," as you call them.
But how did I fall into the line with a set I despised? She had my
opinion of her gamblers, and retorted that young Cressett's turn for
the fling is my doing. I can't swear it's not. There's one of my sins.
What's to wipe them out! She has a tender feeling for the boy; confessed
she wanted governing. Why; she's young, in a way. She has that
particular vice of play. She might be managed. Here's a lesson for her!
Don't you think she might? The right man,--the man she can respect,