Paying Guests. E. F. Benson

Colonel's jaw might have been observed by any careful bystander to drop about half an inch the moment he had done so. He saw that he had left his queen of clubs with only one guard. Perhaps he had settled down to be comfortable, but nobody could possibly have guessed that. Mrs. Holders then led the knave of clubs from her partner's hand, Mrs. Oxney played something of extreme insignificance, and then Mrs. Holders sat and thought. She pulled a card out of her hand, and held it poised. She put it back. She pulled out another card and played the king of clubs. The Colonel played a small one.

      Colonel Chase began to perspire.

      Mrs. Holders pulled out a card again and put it back. A most annoying habit. Then she pulled it out again and played it. It was the ace of clubs. Colonel Chase put on the queen (it couldn't be helped), and Mrs. Oxney discarded something pathetically unimportant in another suit.

      "What? No more clubs?" said Colonel Chase in a voice of intense indignation.

      "No, I wish I had," said poor Mrs. Oxney. "Isn't it bad luck? And I've got such a quantity of--oh, I suppose I mustn't say what."

      "I don't mind," said Mrs. Holders, who thereupon played out the ace of hearts, and followed it with processions of winning clubs and winning spades.

      Colonel Chase said "Pshaw!" Cataracts of diamonds had been spouting from his hand, and rivers of hearts from his partner's.

      "But don't we get any more?" said Mrs. Oxney. "All my beautiful hearts and all your beautiful diamonds?"

      "Fifty for little slam," said Mrs. Holders quite calmly, though her eyebrows had almost disappeared, "and thirty for aces. Then two hundred for my contract, doubled and redoubled, and two hundred more for the extra trick, and below six times two hundred. I think that's all. Dear me!"

      This was intolerable.

      "Not bridge at all," said Colonel Chase. "With not a single diamond in your hand, and spades headed by the knave. Madness! I would have doubled on my hand every time."

      Mrs. Holders knew all that perfectly well. She knew also, (and knew that Colonel Chase knew) that if he had not unguarded his queen of clubs. . . . But then he had, and she went on adding up.

      "And two is seven," she said, "and eight is fifteen, and six is twenty-one, and seven is twenty-eight, and seven is thirty-five, and six is forty-one and carry four, and two and three and five is fourteen and four is eighteen--"

      "Yes, I make that," said Miss Kemp, licking her pencil, "and oh, just look at the hundreds!"

      After they had sufficiently looked at the hundreds, the general reckoning disclosed that Colonel Chase had to pay everybody all round, and he disbursed sums varying from threepence to Mrs. Oxney up to the staggering figure of three and ninepence due to Miss Kemp. All the evenings on which everybody had paid to him were forgotten in general commiseration and nobody dreamed of consoling him with the encouragement he often administered to others, and told him that his game was improving so much that very likely he would soon win it all back again. Mrs. Oxney could scarcely be induced to accept her threepence, and she had to steel herself to the sacrifice by the glad hope that she would lose ten times that sum to him tomorrow. On other nights Colonel Chase usually stood for a long time in front of the fire-place when the rubbers were over, richly rattling coppers in his trousers' pocket, and giving them a few hints about declarations to take up to bed, but now there was no chink of bullion to endorse his wisdom, and he made as short work of his glass of whiskey and water (called 'grog' or 'nightcap') as he had made of the cross-word, and left the victors on the field of battle. Miss Kemp gave him time to get upstairs, in order to avoid the indelicacy of seeing a gentleman open his bedroom door, and perhaps disclose pyjamas warming by the fire, and then followed him in some haste, since her father (there was no indelicacy about that) always expected her to come and talk to him, when he had got to bed, about his evening symptoms, or read to him till he felt sleepy. She knew she was unusually late to-night, and it was possible that he had punished her by already putting out his light. This pathetic proceeding, he was sure, wrung her with agonies of remorse.

      No such severity had been inflicted to-night; he was sitting up in bed with a book in front of him; and a fur tippet belonging to Florence round his neck for the protection of the glands of the throat. On the table beside him was the thermos flask filled with hot milk, in case he felt un-nourished during the night, the glass jug of lemonade made with saccharine instead of sugar in case he felt thirsty, and the clock with the luminous hands.

      "I am late, Papa, I'm afraid," she said. "We had a most exciting rubber which would not come to an end."

      His face wore its most martyred expression: he glanced at the clock which showed the unprecedented hour of eleven.

      "Surely my clock is fast," he said.

      "No; it is eleven," she said. "Shall I read to you?"

      "Far too late: far, far too late. I shall be good for nothing in the morning as it is."

      "You would like to go to sleep then?" she asked. "Shall I put out your light?"

      "Indeed, I should very much like to go to sleep," he said, "but it is already long past my usual hour for going to sleep, and as you know, if I am not asleep by eleven, I often lie awake half the night. No doubt you were absorbed in your game, and could not spare a thought to me. Very natural. Two hours bridge! I was wrong to expect that perhaps it would occur to you--but no matter."

      "Would you like me to talk to you then, if you don't feel you'll go to sleep?" she asked.

      "Perhaps a little talk might compose me," said he, "if you can spare me ten minutes. I am very tired to-night, and that makes me wakeful. I have had a great deal to do. My thermos flask was unfilled, and I had to ring. There were no rusks in my little tin and I had to get out the big tin and fill it. My clock was not wound."

      Florence sat down by his bed. Her chair grated on the margin of boards as she pulled it forward, and he winced.

      "You've got everything now, haven't you?" she asked.

      "Yes. I saw to everything myself. Talk to me, please. Yes?"

      "I won three and ninepence," said Florence. "Colonel Chase lost to everybody."

      "I heard him thumping by just now," said her father. "I supposed he had lost, for he banged his door. I was just beginning to get sleepy. A want of consideration, perhaps. Yes?"

      At each interrogative 'yes', as Florence knew, a fresh topic of interest had to be furnished.

      "Mrs. Oxney won threepence," she said.

      "I am glad. Perhaps she will be able to afford me hot water in my bottle to-morrow. It was tepid tonight. I think you have told me enough about your game of bridge. Yes?"

      "Miss Howard is playing at an entertainment in the assembly rooms next week."

      "I will not go," said Mr. Kemp with some heat. "I do not see why I should be expected to turn out in the evening. Yes?"

      Florence felt the swift on-coming of a sneeze. She fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, and rattled richly among the nine coppers. Several violent explosions followed, and when the spasm subsided, she found her father spraying the air round him with his flask of disinfectant.

      "Perhaps it would be wiser if you sat a little further off," he said. "Yes?"

      "I don't think anything else has happened," said Florence wheezily. "Oh yes, that new arrival, Mrs. Bliss. I saw you talking to her. How she smiles! I wonder why?"

      Mr. Kemp shewed the first sign of withdrawing the blight he had been casting on this commandeered conversation.

      "She told me strange things," he said. "I could make little of them, though I must confess they interested me. She said I was perfectly well, and that pain had no real existence. To say that to me of all people appears on the face of it to be the gibbering of a lunatic. Yet as she talked I certainly did begin to feel that there was something behind it. She told me also that she was perfectly well, though I have never seen anybody limp more heavily. I scarcely think that I was as bad as that after my terrible experiences at Aix. I thought