“Get horses ready!” cried the Count, as he entered the saloon of his hotel, followed by all the guests and gipsies. “Sáshka!—not gipsy Sáshka but my Sáshka—tell the superintendent that I’ll thrash him if he gives me bad horses. And get us some tea. Zavalshévsky, manage the tea; I’m going to have a look at Ilyín and see how he is getting on …” added he, and went along the passage towards the Uhlan’s room.
Ilyín had just finished playing, and having lost his last kopeck, was lying face downwards on the sofa, pulling one hair after another from its torn horsehair cover, putting them in his mouth, biting them in two and spitting them out again.
On the card-table covered with cards, two tallow candles, of which one had already burnt down to the paper in the socket, wrestled feebly with the morning light that crept in through the window. There were no thoughts in the Uhlan’s head; a thick mist of gambling passion veiled all the faculties of his soul: he did not even feel repentant. He made an attempt to think of what he should now do; how, being penniless, he was to get away; how he could repay the 15,000 roubles of Government money; what the Commander of his regiment would say, what his mother and his comrades; and he felt such fear and such disgust at himself that, wishing to forget himself, he rose and began pacing up and down the room, trying to step only where the floorboards joined, and he began vividly to recall once more every slightest detail of the course of play. He vividly imagined how he had begun to win back his money; rejected a nine, and placed the king of spades over 2000 roubles. A queen was dealt to the right, an ace to the left, then the king of diamonds to the right, and all was lost; but if, say, a six had been dealt to the right and the king of diamonds to the left, he would have won everything back, would