," said Archie. "Several times when
you've been standing on the heights and calling attention to the
beautiful view below I've said to myself, 'One push, and he's a deader,'
but something, some mysterious agency within, has kept me back."

"All the fellows at the club----"

Simpson is popularly supposed to belong to a Fleet Street Toilet and
Hairdressing Club, where for three guineas a year he gets shaved every
day, and his hair cut whenever Myra insists. On the many occasions when
he authorises a startling story of some well-known statesman with the
words: "My dear old chap, I know it for a fact. I heard it at the club
to-day from a friend of his," then we know that once again the barber's
assistant has been gossiping over the lather.

"Do think, Samuel," I interrupted, "how much more splendid if you could
be the only man who had seen Monte Carlo without going inside the rooms.
And then when the hairdress--when your friends at the club ask if you've
had any luck at the tables you just say coldly, 'What tables?'"

"Preferably in Latin," said Archie. "_Quae mensae?_"

But it was obviously no good arguing with him. Besides, we were all keen
enough to go.

"We needn't lose," said Myra. "We might win."

"Good idea," said Thomas. He lit his pipe and added, "Simpson was
telling me about his system last night. At least, he was just beginning
when I went to sleep." He applied another match to his pipe and went on,
as if the idea had suddenly struck him, "Perhaps it was only his
internal system he meant. I didn't wait."

"Samuel, you _are_ quite well inside, aren't you?"

"Quite, Myra. But I _have_ invented a sort of system for _roulette_,
which we might----"

"There's only one system which is any good," pronounced Archie. "It's
the system by which, when you've lost all your own money, you turn to
the man next to you and say, 'Lend me a louis, dear old chap, till
Christmas; I've forgotten my purse.'"

"No systems," said Dahlia. "Let's make a collection and put it all on
one number and hope it will win."

Dahlia had obviously been reading novels about people who break the
bank.

"It's as good a way of losing as any other," said Archie. "Let's do it
for our first gamble, anyway. Simpson, as our host, shall put the money
on. I, as his oldest friend, shall watch him to see that he does it.
What's the number to be?"

We all thought hard for several moments.

"Samuel, what's your age?" asked Myra at last.

"Right