t
every seance. Don't be discouraged. I'm confident my system's
unbreakable in the end."

It was half-past two when Mary began luncheon, and she had to finish in
a hurry when Schuyler and Carleton called for her with the motor-car.
She was sorry that she had promised to look at anything so irrelevant as
an aeroplane, and felt nervously irritable because she could not at once
go back to her game. She could almost hear the Casino calling her in a
musical, golden voice: "I have something nice to give you. Why don't you
come and take it?" But it was interesting to tell the two men about her
luck of the morning. Each detail of the play was so fascinating to her
that she would hardly have believed it possible for the story to bore
any one else. She did not ask a single question about the remarkable
hydro-aeroplane in which Carleton was to compete for an important prize
next week; nor did she see the pitying smile the men exchanged while she
entertained them with an exact account of how she had staked, what she
had lost, and what she had won. "Poor child!" the look said. But neither
man blamed the girl for her selfish absorption. Both understood the
phase very well, and it was not long since Carleton had lived it down,
thanks to some friendly brutality on Jim's part. As for Schuyler, though
he never played at the Casino, it was because he had played too often
when a younger man, in America. Roulette and trente et quarante bored
him now, though the great game in Wall Street still had power over his
nerves, when he was in the thick of it. One reason that he avoided
society at Monte Carlo and invited few people to his house was because
the constant babble about the "Rooms" and the "tables" exhausted his
vitality, making him feel, as he said, "like a field-mouse in a vacuum."
Sometimes it had seemed to him that, if once again he heard any one say,
"Oh, if only I had played on seventeen!" he would be forced to strike
the offender, or rush away in self-defence.

Already Mary's eyes were losing the starlike clearness of their delight
in all things novel or beautiful. They looked mistily introspective, as
if they were studying some combination going on in the brain behind
them; and when she could not talk about roulette she relapsed at once
into absent-mindedness. But even her absorbed interest in the new
pursuit was not proof against the hydro-aeroplane lurking in its hangar.
It looked wonderful, yet she could not believe that it wa