Philosophy withdrew him from his temporary interest in the tricks of a circling white marble ball.  The chuck farthing of street urchins has quite as much dignity.  He compared the creatures dabbling, over the board to summer flies on butcher’s meat, periodically scared by a cloth.  More in the abstract, they were snatching at a snapdragon bowl.  It struck him, that the gamblers had thronged on an invitation to drink the round of seed-time and harvest in a gulp.  Again they were desperate gleaners, hopping, skipping, bleeding, amid a whizz of scythe-blades, for small wisps of booty.  Nor was it long before the presidency of an ancient hoary Goat-Satan might be perceived, with skew-eyes and pucker-mouth, nursing a hoof on a knee.

Our mediaeval Enemy sat symbolical in his deformities, as in old Italian and Dutch thick-line engravings of him.  He rolled a ball for souls, excited like kittens, to catch it, and tumbling into the dozens of vacant pits.  So it seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were discoloured by hereditary antagonism.  Had he preserved his philosopher’s eye, he would have known that the Hoofed One is too wily to show himself, owing to his ugliness.  The Black Goddess and no other presides at her own game.  She (it is good for us to know it) is the Power who challenges the individual, it is he who spreads the net for the mass.  She liquefies the brain of man; he petrifies or ossifies the heart.  From her comes craziness, from him perversity:  a more provocative and, on the whole, more contagious disease.  The gambler does not seek to lead his fellows into perdition; the snared of the Demon have pleasure in the act.  Hence our naturally interested forecasts of the contests between them:  for if he is beaten, as all must be at the close of an extended game with her, we have only to harden the brain against her allurements and we enter a clearer field.

Woodseer said to Fleetwood:  ’That ball has a look of a nymph running round and round till she changes to one of the Fates.’

‘We’ll have a run with her,’ said Fleetwood, keener for business than for metaphors—­at the moment.

He received gold for a bank-note.  Captain Abrane hurriedly begged a loan.  Both of them threw.  Neither of them threw on the six numbers Woodseer would have selected, and they lost.  He stated that the number of 17 had won before.  Abrane tried the transversal enclosing this favoured number.  ‘Of course!’ he cried, with foul resignation and a hostile glare:  the ball had seated itself and was grinning at him from the lowest of the stalls.

Fleetwood quitted the table-numbers to throw on Pair; he won, won again, pushed his luck and lost, dragging Abrane with him.  The giant varied his tone of acquiescence in Fortune’s whims:  ’Of course!  I ’ve only to fling!  Luck hangs right enough till I put down my stake.’

‘If the luck has gone three times, the chances . . . .’  Woodseer was rather inquiring than pronouncing. . . .  Lord Fleetwood cut him short.  ‘The chances are equally the contrary!’ and discomposed his argumentative mind.