His face too might once have been handsome, before he got the red
scar across his forehead, or his red eyelids and straggling beard. I
could not help watching the pair--he throwing down the dice
disdainfully, as though good or bad luck were all the same to him, and
when he won giving a push to the girl to collect the money, whereupon
she would take a long dagger that lay on the table, and with the bare
blade just sweep the coins to one side as if they were so much dirt.
Neither of them spoke a word, while their partners--rough young churls
with red faces and glassy eyes--cursed freely in Spanish and French,
and struck the table with their clenched fists. The girl seemed at
length to tire of the game, and looking round her with a yawn, chanced
to spy me out for the first time, for when I entered she was dozing on
the man's shoulder. I suppose my dress took her fancy, or the ring on
my finger; suffice it to say that she began to cast meaning glances at
me, and to make signs with her hand behind her lover's back, which I
neither understood nor attended to, but gulped down my wine the more
quickly that I might slip away, when all of a sudden she sprang from
the knee of the gloomy gambler, and seated herself on the bench beside
me as if intending to sleep, but in reality she kept ogling me all the
time. The man with the scar seemed aware of something wrong, for he
loudly called to her in French to come back at once, but she pretended
to be asleep, and not to hear him. At that he started up in a rage and
bade me go my ways at once--said he had seen me making signals to the
girl, and luring her from his lap. I who was inwardly furious at his
brutality, put on a careless semblance, and said that no one had a
right to bid me leave, that I was interfering with nobody, and paying
for my wine like the rest. At that he grew frantic, dragged the girl
from the bench, and called out to the host to know why he did not keep
his house clear of suspicious characters who only came to spy, called
me all sorts of opprobrious names, and when the girl took my part,
seized hold of my doublet, and tore my collar. I saw now pretty plainly
what I had brought upon myself, for all the rest of the gamblers joined
in the outcry, and the landlord, who got his livelihood through men of
that class, and did not want decent customers, rudely told me that I
was out of place in a house like his where people knew their manners.
'Very good,' I said, 'I will no lo