Returning to his villa one evening Blenkinthrope found his wife sitting in front of a pack of cards, which she was scrutinising with unusual concentration.

“The same old patience-game?” he asked carelessly.

“No, dear; this is the Death’s Head patience, the most difficult of them all.  I’ve never got it to work out, and somehow I should be rather frightened if I did.  Mother only got it out once in her life; she was afraid of it, too.  Her great-aunt had done it once and fallen dead from excitement the next moment, and mother always had a feeling that she would die if she ever got it out.  She died the same night that she did it.  She was in bad health at the time, certainly, but it was a strange coincidence.”

“Don’t do it if it frightens you,” was Blenkinthrope’s practical comment as he left the room.  A few minutes later his wife called to him.

“John, it gave me such a turn, I nearly got it out.  Only the five of diamonds held me up at the end.  I really thought I’d done it.”

“Why, you can do it,” said Blenkinthrope, who had come back to the room; “if you shift the eight of clubs on to that open nine the five can be moved on to the six.”

His wife made the suggested move with hasty, trembling fingers, and piled the outstanding cards on to their respective packs.  Then she followed the example of her mother and great-grand-aunt.

Blenkinthrope had been genuinely fond of his wife, but in the midst of his bereavement one dominant thought obtruded itself.  Something sensational and real had at last come into his life; no longer was it a grey, colourless record.  The headlines which might appropriately describe his domestic tragedy kept shaping themselves in his brain.  “Inherited presentiment comes true.”  “The Death’s Head patience:  Card-game that justified its sinister name in three generations.”  He wrote out a full story of the fatal occurrence for the Essex Vedette, the editor of which was a friend of his, and to another friend he gave a condensed account, to be taken up to the office of one of the halfpenny dailies.  But in both cases his reputation as a romancer stood fatally in the way of the fulfilment of his ambitions.  “Not the right thing to be Munchausening in a time of sorrow” agreed his friends among themselves, and a brief note of regret at the “sudden death of the wife of our respected neighbour, Mr. John Blenkinthrope, from heart failure,” appearing in the news column of the local paper was the forlorn outcome of his visions of widespread publicity.

Blenkinthrope shrank from the society of his erstwhile travelling companions and took to travelling townwards by an earlier train.  He sometimes tries to enlist the sympathy and attention of a chance acquaintance in details of the whistling prowess of his best canary or the dimensions of his largest beetroot; he scarcely recognises himself as the man who was once spoken about and pointed out as the owner of the Seventh Pullet.