“Don’t you want to make it double or quit, sir?”

He said nothing. Formerly, if you remember, he would call me a fool for such a boldness. And we went to playing “quit or double.”

I won eighty rubles of him.

Well, what would you think? Since that first time he used to play with me every day. He would wait till there was no one about, for of course he would have been ashamed to play with a mere marker in presence of others. Once he had got rather warmed up by the play (he already owed me sixty rubles), and so he says⁠—

“Do you want to stake all you have won?”

“All right,” says I.

I won. “One hundred and twenty to one hundred and twenty?”

“All right,” says I.

187