But Tommy Crevequer stood up suddenly.

'Ninety-eight and sixty-three. I say, Betty----'

Betty nodded.

'They're ours all right. The ambo; that's how much--seventy-five francs.'

The Crevequers were rapid and accurate at mental arithmetic.

Congratulation buzzed round them.

Some one raised a voice of anguish.

'Madre Dio, I should have won the terno if I'd staked the numbers my husband had from the parocco, and I forgot all about it!'

The general opinion, conveyed by shrugs and expressive pursings of the lips, seemed to be that this was a great pity for Maddalena. They all knew her husband, who was a Guardian of the Public Security and a hard man. A friend of his remarked, in a confidential undertone, with no uncertainty on the subject, 'He'll cut her throat for her.'

'It won't be the first time if he does,' returned his neighbour. 'Dio!

what a fool!'

A man from a table in a corner got up and came over to the Crevequers, and sat down beside them, with an aspect of resolution, good-humoured but adamant.

'I shall come with you when you fetch it,' he observed, nodding cheerfully.

Tommy looked at him, his eyebrows a little aggrieved.

'Oh, Grollo, you----I tell you, I've any amount to do with it; it will go no way.'

'On the contrary, it will go nearly all the way. For the remaining five francs I'll wait.'

'I've got to get my evening clothes out of p.a.w.n; I'm going out to dinner on Monday.'

'Well, you must go as you are, then.'

Tommy looked at him resentfully.

'Well, half, then--forty?'

'I shall come with you when you fetch it,' the creditor repeated, good-temperedly stubborn.

'Oh, well----' Tommy shrugged his shoulders resignedly. 'Come, then; I shall fetch it now. Coming, Betty?'

'No.'

Betty was talking to Gina Lunelli. Gina was a fine young woman, rather beautiful, with black curly hair, and an immense amount of experience, on and off the music-hall stage, for her twenty-seven years. She was a great friend of the Crevequers; it rather entertained her that anyone should be so silly and so young. All the men she knew made love to her as a matter of course--or possibly she made love to them; it, anyhow, between the two, was invariably made. Tommy Crevequer's love-making was to both an excellent joke; to Betty also, for they were nearly always a three-cornered party. Gina and Betty went out now and stood in the street and talked; or rather Gina talked, and Betty listened and rather often laughed; it took very little to amuse the Crevequers. Soon Tommy came back; he carried a parcel; his face was rather gloomy.

'Grollo's got it all,' he remarked resentfully. 'But I've got my dress-clothes; I met Venables.'

'He who walks home from the theatre with you?' Gina said to Betty.

'Yes. He's always so kind about lending us money,' Betty explained.

Gina nodded. She had once been introduced to Venables in the Crevequers'

room; she had been a little embarra.s.sed with him; it was a type outside her fairly wide sphere of experience.

'Well, good-bye till to-night; I must go.'

The Crevequers walked home through the darkening December afternoon.

'Venables is really decent,' Tommy observed, with some enthusiasm.

Betty nodded. They had seen a good deal of Venables lately. Yesterday he and Betty had been to Baja in a motor-car; it had amused them both very much. He was a good companion, being quite ready and able to enter into the game of being hopelessly silly, which, the Crevequers had long since found, very many people, otherwise pleasant, quite failed to understand.

n.o.body, it seemed to them, understood it quite as well as they did themselves; it was fortunate, therefore, as they sometimes remarked, that they had each other to go about with.

In the evolution of relations with the Venables, that with Warren seemed now to be, on the whole, the most satisfactory. The relation with Mrs.

Venables, though her own 'achievement of intimacy' suffered no flagging, had been to the Crevequers a little spoiled by a renunciation on their side. For sometime they co-operated readily and cheerfully in the process of eduction; knowing it their business to 'strike,' they did their best to do so, laying on effects sometimes a little over lurid.

They inst.i.tuted compet.i.tions as to which of them could call forth most often during an interview the comment 'very striking.' Tommy usually won, because, as Betty complained, Mrs. Venables was more easily struck by boys than by girls. It was Tommy who appropriated Betty's idea of the worship of Pan that lingered in country districts about Naples.

'That's why goats are so common, all about the streets--don't you know?'

He turned to Miranda, who nodded.

'I know. Beasts. I hate them.'

Mrs. Venables was stirred.

'So vestiges of paganism really do linger. That is extremely striking.'

Tommy, pluming himself, happened to look across and meet Miss Varley's eyes fastened consideringly upon him. He returned the regard with his melancholy gaze.

'Not only Pan, either--Venus, Jupiter, Mars----'

'Don't!' Miranda interrupted. 'You're going on just like my astronomy mistress. She was a beast. I hated her. And I hate stars. And you do talk rot, you two. You both tell the most awful----'

But Tommy was looking at Miss Varley with his sad regard from under quick black brows.

She turned to her aunt and started a new subject.

Tommy remarked to her as he said good-bye:

'I'm sorry you thought I was so rude.'

She looked at him for a moment.

'I shouldn't have thought you were particularly sorry, you know.

Good-bye.'

The leisurely considering tone, that quite lacked interest, seemed to add an edge to the words.