Kit put down her coffee-cup and leaned back in her chair. The thing had gone wrong; she had meant to have got first innings on the subject of baccarat cheating, and she was rather afraid she was clean bowled. Quick as she was, she could not see her answer. Mr. Alington did not, however, look at her, nor did he pause longer than was necessary to sip his coffee.
"Your tactics were a little open, a little obvious, Lady Conybeare, if you will allow me to say so," he went on. "Delicious coffee! You exchanged so many glances with Lady Haslemere, and then looked up at me, that I could not fail to see you were watching for something. No man, I expect, likes to be suspected of so very paltry a crime as cheating at baccarat--a crime so hopelessly void of any grandeur--and no man, I am sure, likes a trap being laid for him by those whom he is entitled to consider his friends. And before I go on to the point I have in my mind I should like to say a word about this."
He cleared his throat and sipped his coffee again.
"What you and Lady Haslemere saw," he went on--"did your husband suspect me too? It does not matter--what you saw was this: I had declared a natural, and you saw me, as you thought, push a fifty-pound counter over the line. Was that not so?"
"There is no question of 'thought,'" said Kit, whom a sense of danger made the more incautious; "we saw you do it."
"Quite true. If you had observed a little more closely, you would have seen something else. Now, I ask you, the few times we have played baccarat together, did you ever see me fail to stake?"
"Quite so. If you had looked at the table a moment before, you would have seen I had nothing staked. What happened was this: I had staked four ten-pound counters and two fives; then, seeing that I had no more smaller ones, I withdrew them to substitute one fifty for them. At that moment I received my cards, and, taking them up I forgot for the moment to substitute my fifty. I looked at the cards, declared the natural, and you saw me push forward the fifty-pound counter quite openly, and, so you thought, clumsily. It never occurred to me for a moment there was any need of an explanation."
Kit's anger and alarm was growing on her.
"Very clumsily," she said; "we all saw it."