It had actual colour like honey, or the pinky-golden skin of
apricots. It was bright, yet the impression it made on the mind was of
softness rather than brilliance; and the shining atmosphere of the room,
instead of being clear, seemed charged with infinitesimal particles of
floating gold, like motes in rays of sunshine. The tables, under darkly
shaded, low-hanging lamps, gave the effect of sending a yellow smoke,
like incense, up to the height of the great dazzling chandeliers. It was
almost as if the hands of players in fingering gold pieces day after
day, year after year for generations, had rubbed off minute flakes which
hung like a golden haze in the air.

It appeared to Mary's eyes, taking in the whole and not dwelling upon
details, that everything in the farther part of the vast domed room was
of gold: different shades of gold; dark, old gold, the richer for being
tarnished: bright, glittering, guinea gold: greenish gold, and gold of
copper red.

No other colour could have been as appropriate here.

The air was not offensively dead, but it was langorously asleep. Many
different perfumes haunted and weighed it down; but there was some
underlying, distinctive odour which excited the nerves mysteriously, and
sent the blood racing through the veins.

"It is the smell of money," Mary said to herself.

Just inside the entrance doors, on either side, was a large table round
which people sat or stood. Those standing behind the chairs of the
seated ones were at least two rows deep, crowded tightly together.
Beyond were many other tables, thronged even more densely; and ringed
thus with closely packed figures, they were like islands on a shining
golden sea, an archipelago of little islands, all of exactly the same
size, and placed at equal distances.

Mary, hardly knowing what to expect from Peter's rather vague and
disjointed descriptions, had dimly fancied clamour and confusion
bursting upon eyes and ears on the instant of entering the
gambling-rooms. But the silence of the place was as haunting and
mystery-suggesting as the indefinable odour, and more thrilling to the
imagination than the loudest noise.

She who had been Sister Rose was horrified to find herself thinking of a
cathedral lighted for a midnight mass. Almost, she expected organ music
to peal out.

Slowly she moved down the room, past the first tables, and, as she
walked, the muffled, characteristic sounds she began to hear seemed but
to punctuate