mployed by the Casino,
and all the watching eyes of the horned animal were asleep. Vanno stared
at the great cream-white building with a brooding resentment, because of
the influence which he believed it to exert over his clouded star. He
fancied that she had been drawn here by its extraordinary magnetism
which pulsed like electricity across Europe; and that, if she had not
already been swept off her feet, soon she would be, and her soul
drowned. To his own surprise, he could himself feel the mysterious
power of the place. As he looked at the long windows framed in rose-red
marble he remembered what his Arab friend, the astrologer in the desert,
had said to him about this month of December.

"Could it be possible, if there were anything in the science of
astrology," Vanno asked himself, "that the stars could rule the chances
in a game of chance?" Vaguely he thought, with the mystic side of his
nature, that to study, and prove or disprove this idea, might be
interesting. But the side that was stern and ascetic thrust away the
suggestion. He remembered the thousands of people who drifted here from
all over the world, hoping for one reason or other to get the gold
guarded by this big white dragon. Some perhaps believed in their stars;
others had studied systems, and tried them on little roulette wheels at
home; but nearly all went away defeated. The form of the long, high
mountain called the Tete de Chien looked to Vanno like a giant man lying
face down in despair, the shape of his head, his back, and supine legs
tragic in desperate abandon. "That's a symbol," Vanno said, half aloud,
and felt no longer the strange pulling at his heartstrings which for a
moment had drawn him, too, under the influence. He thought of himself as
one of the few, the very few, people within a wide range of Monte Carlo
for whom the Casino meant nothing. For surely there were few indeed.
Even the peasants among the mountains owed their living indirectly to
the Casino. Because of its existence they were able to command large
prices for their fruit and flowers and vegetables, or anything they
could produce which pleasure-lovers drawn by the Casino could possibly
want. Over there on the Rock, where red roofs of houses crowded closely
together, everybody lived in one way or other by the Casino. No one,
Vanno had been told, who was not Monegasque by birth or nationalization
was allowed to live on the Rock. Probably many of the croupiers in the
Casino a