him. Mr. Carleton and Captain Hannaford were friends, and
Mr. Schuyler evidently knew Madame d'Ambre, so everything had turned out
delightfully. Also it was exciting to see how people who came in looked
at her and whispered. She could not help knowing that they said,
"There's the girl who won so much in the Casino that everybody rushed to
her table and applauded."

It was wonderful, intoxicating, to be the heroine of such a place, to
have experienced players envy her. She longed for to-morrow morning, so
that she might go back to the same table at the Casino, and play on zero
and twenty-four again. "I think I shall always make that my game, and go
to the same table," she said to herself, with the unconscious egotism
and vanity of a child.

"What was that I caught as I arrived, about 'finding out the great
secret?'" Schuyler asked, when he sat down at a place made for him on
Madame d'Ambre's right hand. Again he fixed his eyes on her, this time
with polite interest. "I thought the words sounded familiar. I remember
your saying something of the sort, I'm sure, the evening of our first
meeting."

"I do not recall it, Monsieur," replied Madeleine.

"It was on the Casino terrace," he went on, reflectively. "I was walking
there between the first and second acts of an opera, about a fortnight
ago. We met, and you seemed depressed, Madame. It was then I was able to
do you that small service."

"I did not think of it as a service," she said, bitterly.

"Ah, now the occasion has come back to you. What, not a service when a
lady has a little bottle of poison stuck into her belt, and a man drinks
it himself rather than she should keep her threat and swallow it!"

"It was not a threat. I would have drunk the poison and ended
everything," she insisted.

"If I hadn't been so selfish and greedy as to take it out of your hand
and sample it. Strange it did me no harm. I had a presentiment it
wouldn't, somehow. But of course my system may be poison-proof. By the
way, isn't that the same pretty little bottle I see now, tucked into
your belt! And were you thinking of trying its effect again to-night, if
these friends hadn't come in time to cheer you up, and so put off the
evil day?"

"You are very cruel to make sport of my tragedy, Monsieur!" Madame
d'Ambre exclaimed, her soft wistfulness flashing into anger. "These
sympathetic ones have saved me from myself by their generosity. They
have made me happy. Why do you go out of your