"Two hundred and fifty thousand," he said to himself. He repeated it again and again as a sort of dull drum-beat accompaniment, resounding in his ears, even as his cane tapped out its sharp metallic punctuation. "Two hundred _and_ fifty!" he said for the hundredth time, utterly unable to comprehend what had in one hour changed the face of his world. He stopped, drew his hand from his pocket, took the crumpled check and placed it in his wallet, buttoned his coat carefully, and then unbuttoned it to make sure it had not slipped from his pocket. Drake had not asked him the vital question. He had not had to answer him, to tell him what he had lost, to own that he had gambled beyond his right. The issue he had gone to meet, resolved on a clean confession, had been evaded, and in his pocket was the check--a fortune! Certain facts did not at once focus in his mind, perhaps because he did not want to contemplate them, perhaps because he was too bewildered with his own sensations to perceive clearly what a role he had been made to play. But as he swung down the Avenue past the Plaza with its Argus-eyed windows still awake, past a few great mansions with cars and grouped footmen in wait for revelers, at the thought of the quiet Court, of Roscoe and Granning, at the sudden startled recollection of DeLancy, the cold fact forced itself upon him; they had lost and he had won. He had won because they had lost, and how many others! "How could I help it?" he said to himself uneasily, and answered it immediately with another question "But will they believe me?" Suddenly Drake's last question flashed across him with a new significance. "Of course you didn't tell any one, did you?" Why had he not asked him then and there what he had meant? Because he had been afraid, because he did not wish to know the answer, just as he had evaded the knowledge that Doris in the first speculation had made use of Boskirk. Even now he did not wish to force the ugly fact--seeking to put it from him with plausible reasonings. After all, what had Drake done? Told him a lie? No. He had specially cautioned him not to jump to conclusions, warned him against doing anything on his own initiative. "Yes, that's true," he said with a sigh of relief, as though a great ethical question had been disposed of. "He played square, absolutely square. There's nothing wrong in it." Yet somehow the conviction brought no joy with it; there was something stolen about the sensation of sudden wealth which possessed him. He seemed to be scurrying through the shadowy city almost like a thief afraid of confrontation.