By this time Prewitz had come to Wenk. He looked at him steadfastly for a while, then suddenly seized his left breast-pocket and drew out the revolver, placing himself at Wenk’s side, the weapon in his hand. Weltmann said from the stage, “That is because you are so incautious as to carry a loaded revolver in your pocket! Please”--he turned to the audience--“be so good as to read what I have written there!” Someone read out: “The Baron is to go along the first row, chair by chair, and where he finds someone with a loaded revolver in his pocket, he is to take it out and sit beside him with it.” They all clapped their hands, a proceeding which Weltmann, by a brief gesture, stopped. He left off writing, handed the block down to the Princess, and sat down with the card-players. “Page one!” he said to his hostess. She read it to herself, then handed it to her right-hand neighbour and looked anxiously towards the stage, where the following incidents were taking place. Weltmann won game after game. Sometimes he looked away from the table, and then it seemed to Wenk as if he were beckoning him to come up. Wenk knew it must be a delusion, due to some effect of the light striking Weltmann’s eye, but none the less he felt uneasy. The idea occurred to him to yield, and go up so that he might face this man at close quarters and make sure that those lightning glances had no reference to him. “Yet that would be very foolish!” he said to himself, striving to get rid of the impulse. Suddenly, without a single word having been spoken, one of the players leaned back, saying in a clear ringing voice, as if speaking aloud in a dream, “What have I just done? I had twenty-one, and then someone spoke with my voice, and said, ‘I have lost again.’” He seized the cards he had thrown aside, and showed an ace, a knave and a ten. “Too late!” said Weltmann, who was holding the bank. Wenk put his hands to his head. He had already lived through such a scene once before. When was it, where, and to whom did it occur? He cudgelled his brains to remember. The image of it stood out distinctly, but it stood apart from any suggestion of the time and place and person. From the recesses of his mind a form seemed to emerge simultaneously with his groping efforts to recover the recollections he sought. A form--was it a human being, a lifeless column, a monster? He could not say which ... but then the form was bleeding somewhere, and now Wenk saw, through the misty phantasies of these recent occurrences, that it had a mouth, and that this mouth suddenly uttered, in clear staccato tones, the name “Tsi--nan--fu!”