e same reason, from accepting Vanno's invitation to
meet him "on the land" a little later. He too had a funeral service that
day, but a very different funeral, and one which oppressed "St. George"
Winter with a peculiar sadness. Death, as a rule, did not seem sad to
him; but he had a horror of the habit of gambling, which appeared to his
eyes like an incubus on a man's life, a dead albatross hung round the
neck to rot. And this man who had died and was to be buried in the
cemetery at Monaco had been a gambler for thirty years. He and his faded
wife had existed rather than lived in a third-class hotel, where they
kept on the same rooms year after year, never going away in the summer
unless, if exceptionally prosperous, to spend a few of the hottest weeks
in the mountains. Their tiny rooms were given them at a cheap rate
because the man brought clients to the hotel, "amateurs" who wished to
learn his great system, the system to whose perfecting he had devoted
thirty years. He had advertised himself, and almost believed in himself,
as "_le roi de la roulette_," who for payment of two louis would impart
to any one the secret of unlimited wealth. Ignoring failure, pursuing
success, his own tiny fortune, his wife's youth, had gone. And as his
body went to the grave the whole record of his life--thousands of
roulette cards in neat packets, innumerable notebooks containing the
great secret--lay waiting for the dustman. The man's wife in preparing
to leave Monte Carlo forever had turned all his treasures out of the
trunks where through years they had accumulated, and had them flung into
a huge dust bin kept for the waste things of the hotel kitchen. This
George Winter knew, for the woman had boasted bitterly of the last
revenge she meant to take. "'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.' Let all be
swept away and forgotten," she had said; and the words haunted the
chaplain, mourning through his brain like the voice of the tideless sea
that moaned ceaselessly under his study window.

He longed to go back to Rose and be cheered by her into hopefulness, to
have her assure him in her warm, loving way that he was doing some good
in this strange place of brilliant gayety and black tragedy; that his
work was not all in vain, though so often he likened it to the task of
Sisyphus. But he found Dick Carleton with Rose, and their faces told him
that there was no hope of comfort.

"Oh, St. George, poor Captain Hannaford is dead!" were Rose's first