The Judge paws out a place for her and I go along to watch.  She pries open a bead reticule that my mother had one like and gets out a knitted silk purse, and takes a five-dollar gold piece into her little bony white fingers and drops it on a number, and says:  “Now that is well over!” But it wasn’t over.  There was excitement right off, because, outside of some silver dollars I’d lost myself, I hadn’t seen anything bigger than a two-bit piece played there that night.  Right over my shoulder I heard heavy breathing and I didn’t have to turn round to know it was Cora Wales.  When the ball slowed up she quit breathing entirely till it settled.

It must of been a horrible strain on her, for the man was raking in all the little bets and leaving the five-dollar one that win.  Say!  That woman gripped an arm of mine till I thought it was caught in machinery of some kind!  And Mrs. Doc Martingale, that she gripped on the other side, let out a yell of agony.  But that wasn’t the worst of Cora Wales’ torture.  No, sir!  She had to stand there and watch this little old-fashioned sport from South Carolina refuse the money!

“But I can’t accept it from you good people,” says she in her thin little voice.  “I intended to help the cause of those poor sufferers, and to profit by the mere inadvertence of your toy there would be unspeakable—­really no!”

And she pushed back the five and the hundred and seventy-five that the dealer had counted out for her, dusted her little fingers with a little lace handkerchief smelling of lavender, and asked the Judge to show her a game that wasn’t so noisy.

I guess Cora Wales was lost from that moment.  She had Len over in a corner again, telling him how easy it was to win, and how this poor demented creature had left all hers there because Judge Ballard probably didn’t want to create a scene by making her take it; and mustn’t they have a lot of trouble looking after the weak-minded thing all the time!  And I could hear her say if one person could do it another could, especially if they had learned how to get in tune with the Infinite.  Len says all right, how much does she want to risk?  And that scares her plumb stiff again, in spite of her uncanny powers.  She says it wouldn’t be right to risk one cent unless she could be sure the number was going to win.

Of course if you made your claim on the Universal, your own was bound to come to you; still, you couldn’t be so sure as you ought to be with a roulette wheel, because several times the ball had gone into numbers that she wasn’t holding for with her psychic grip, and the uncertainty was killing her; and why didn’t he say something to help her, instead of standing there silent and letting their little home slip from her grasp?

Cousin Egbert comes up just then, still happy and puffed up; so I put him wise to this Wales conspiracy against his game.

“Mebbe you can win back that lot from her,” I says, “and raffle it over again for the fund.  She’s getting worked up to where she’ll take a chance.”