Mr. Crofts had spoken no more than the truth when he said that the club was small and select. In point of fact it was neither more nor less than a little coterie of gamblers. There were the usual reading, smoking, and billiard-rooms, but the card-room was the real focus of attraction. Frank, who like his father was a born gambler, entered heartily into the thing, and before long got into the way of spending three or four evenings a week at the "Bons Frères." The last train between Dulminster and Ashdown left the former place a quarter of an hour before midnight, but when Frank chanced to miss it--which he usually did at least once a week--there was always a bed for him at his friend's, while the eight o'clock morning train landed him at Ashdown in ample time for business. It was scarcely to be expected that Frank should content himself with a quiet pool at billiards, while such exciting games as baccarat and unlimited loo were in progress in the next room. Accordingly his cue was left to languish on the wall, and he turned his attention wholly to that other board of green cloth which for him was by far the more seductive of the two. Occasionally he rose from the table a winner, but fortune frowned on him far oftener than she smiled. The fact was that both by nature and disposition Frank was too rash and impulsive to be evenly matched as against certain cool and cautious habitués of the club--old hands who look upon the card-table as a regular source of income, and never throw away a chance. But although he lost and lost again, his ardor for play in nowise abated; rather, indeed, did it seem to grow the fiercer with the gradual lightening of his pockets. Mrs. Derison had always insisted on Frank's putting aside a certain portion of his salary, month by month, in the Ashdown Savings' Bank, and the amount thus laid by had by this time accumulated to something like a hundred and fifty pounds. On this fund Frank now began to draw, of course without his mother's knowledge, in order to enable him to meet his losses at cards, Five or six weeks sufficed to make a big hole in his small capital, but still, with the gambler's desperate recklessness, he kept on his course, convinced from day to day that "luck" must change in his favor, and fatuously failing to recognize the fact that he was being quietly but effectually fleeced, and that without any suspicion of cheating on their part, by men far cleverer than himself.