Meantime, let me be pictured as reposing in fancied security from all
evil predictions while I awaited the return of the Honourable George.
I was only too certain he would come suffering from an acute acid
dyspepsia, for I had seen lobster in his shifty eyes as he left me;
but beyond this I apprehended nothing poignant, and I gave myself up
to meditating profoundly upon our situation.

Frankly, it was not good. I had done my best to cheer the Honourable
George, but since our brief sojourn at Ostend, and despite the almost
continuous hospitality of the Americans, he had been having, to put it
bluntly, an awful hump. At Ostend, despite my remonstrance, he had
staked and lost the major portion of his quarter's allowance in
testing a system at the wheel which had been warranted by the person
who sold it to him in London to break any bank in a day's play. He had
meant to pause but briefly at Ostend, for little more than a test of
the system, then proceed to Monte Carlo, where his proposed terrific
winnings would occasion less alarm to the managers. Yet at Ostend the
system developed such grave faults in the first hour of play that we
were forced to lay up in Paris to economize.

For myself I had entertained doubts of the system from the moment of
its purchase, for it seemed awfully certain to me that the vendor
would have used it himself instead of parting with it for a couple of
quid, he being in plain need of fresh linen and smarter boots, to say
nothing of the quite impossible lounge-suit he wore the night we met
him in a cab shelter near Covent Garden. But the Honourable George had
not listened to me. He insisted the chap had made it all enormously
clear; that those mathematical Johnnies never valued money for its own
sake, and that we should presently be as right as two sparrows in a
crate.