Yes, there sat Ned Severne, talking familiarly to Joseph Ashmead, and preparing to “put the pot on,” as he called it. Now Zoe was so far gone that the very sight of Severne was a balsam to her. She had a little bone to pick with him; and when he was out of sight, the bone seemed pretty large. But when she saw his adorable face, unconscious, as it seemed, of wrong, the bone faded and the face shone. Her own face cleared at the sight of him: she turned back to Fanny and Vizard, arch and smiling, and put her finger to her mouth, as much as to say, “Let us have some fun. We have caught our truant: let us watch him, unseen, a little, before we burst on him.” Vizard enjoyed this, and encouraged her with a nod. The consequence was that Zoe dropped Miss Maitland's arm, who took that opportunity to turn up her nose, and began to creep up like a young cat after a bird; taking a step, and then pausing; then another step, and a long pause; and still with her eye fixed on Severne. He did not see her, nor her companions, partly because they were not in front of him, but approaching at a sharp angle, and also because he was just then beginning to bet heavily on his system. By this means, two progressive events went on contemporaneously: the arch but cat-like advance of Zoe, with pauses, and the betting of Severne, in which he gave himself the benefit of his system. _Noir_ having been the last to win, he went against the alternation and put fifty pounds on _noir._ Red won. Then, true to his system, he doubled on the winning color. One hundred pounds on red. Black won. He doubled on black, and red won; and there were four hundred pounds of his five hundred gone in five minutes. On this proof that the likeliest thing to happen--viz., alternation of the color--does _sometime_ happen, Severne lost heart. He turned to Ashmead, with all the superstition of a gambler, “For God's sake, bet for me!” said he. He clutched his own hair convulsively, in a struggle with his mania, and prevailed so far as to thrust fifty pounds into his own pocket, to live on, and gave Ashmead five tens. “Well, but,” said Ashmead, “you must tell me what to do.” “No, no. Bet your own way, for me.” He had hardly uttered these words, when he seemed to glare across the table at the great mirror, and, suddenly putting his handkerchief to his mouth, he made a bolt sidewise, plunged amid the bystanders, and emerged only to dash into a room at the side. As he disappeared, a lady came slowly and pensively forward from the outer door; lifted her eyes as she neared the table, saw a vacant chair, and glided into it, revealing to Zoe Vizard and her party a noble face, not so splendid and animated as on the stage, for its expression was slumbering; still it was the face of Ina Klosking. No transformation trick was ever done more neatly and smoothly than this, in which, nevertheless, the performers acted without concert.