“It isn’t luck at all,” the other interrupted.  “It’s your play.  You play too bold a game—­too bold when you know he is going to play a bolder.  Twice running he caught you last night bluffing on no hand at all; and I don’t know what fabulous stakes were up—­with your nods and signs.  It’s no use your trying to bluff that fellow.  He won’t be bluffed.”

“The thing is as broad as it’s long, man,” Lionel said, impatiently.  “If he is determined to see me every time, he must be caught when I have a good hand—­it stands to reason.  The only thing is that my luck has been so confoundedly bad of late.”

“Yes; and when the luck’s against you, you go betting on no hands at all—­with Miles waiting for you!” his companion exclaimed.  “All right; every man must play the game his own way.  You don’t seem to have found it profitable so far.”

“Profitable!” Lionel said, with a dark look in his eyes.  “I can tell you I am in a tight corner, and I reckoned on to-night to settle it one way or the other—­not with you fellows, I can’t get anything worth while out of you, but with Miles.  And now he’s gone away home with—­”

He stopped in time; ladies’ names are not mentioned in clubs—­at least, not in such clubs as the Garden.

“The odd thing is,” continued Johnny, as he lit a cigarette, and definitely refused to have any more of the wine, “the extremely odd thing is that he doesn’t seem to care to win from the rest of us.  He lets us share our modest little pots as if they weren’t worth looking at.  It’s you he goes for, invariably.”

“And he’s gone for me to some purpose,” Lionel said, morosely.  “I’m just about broke—­broke five or six times over, if it comes to that—­and by that pennyworth of yellow ribbon!”

“You needn’t call him names,” said Johnny, as he lay back in his chair.  “Upon my soul I think Miles is somebody in disguise—­a priest—­an Inquisitor—­somebody with a mission—­to punish the sin of gambling.  What does he care about the game?  Nothing—­I’ll swear it!  He’s only watching for you.  He’s an avenger.  He has been sent by some superior power—­”

“Then it must have been by the devil,” said Lionel, with a sombre expression, “for he has got the devil’s own luck at his back.  Wait till I get four of a kind when he is betting on a full hand—­and then you’ll see his corpse laid out!” This was all he could say just then; for here was the young man himself, who must have come back from the Edgeware Road in a remarkably swift hansom.

Almost directly there was an adjournment to the card-room; and the players took their places.

“I propose we have in the joker,"[2] Lionel called aloud, as the cards were dealt for deal.

[Footnote 2:  The joker is a fifty-third card, of any kind of device, which is added to the pack; the player to whom it is dealt can make it any card he chooses.  For example, if the other four cards he holds are two queens and two sevens, he can make the joker card a third queen, and thus secure for himself a full hand.]

“I don’t see the fun of it,” objected the young man who had been Lionel’s companion at the supper-table.  “You never know where you are when the joker is in.  What do you say, Miles?”