XIII
The Goose and the Golden Egg
I met Dunford accidentally at Boulogne. I was struggling home from Chantilly, rather storm-tossed by adverse circumstances, it may be confessed, but imperturbably cheerful through all. Dunford, on the contrary, was depressed. I had struck up acquaintance with the man on the Rugby platform a year before, and had found him a dull, heavy dog; but coming across one another in the Rue Victor Hugo on a wet day we greeted each other cordially.
He had done pretty well on the Westenhanger course, he told me, and then, having nothing better to do, he had crossed on the previous day, and in pursuit of a system had lost on the little horses all that he had won on the big ones. I also have a system, a much better and simpler one than his, and as Dunford still had a few pounds left I proposed that we should go back to the rooms and retrieve his losses. He assented moodily, so we went to the casino and played the game my way, but not entirely my way, for at the very worst possible moments Dunford would introduce variations of his own, with the inevitable consequence that in half-an-hour he was as penniless as I was.
"I wish to Peter that I had never met you," he remarked ill-temperedly as we went out. "I had kept back enough to carry me to Newmarket. What on earth are we going to do now?"
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