astonished murmur of the bystanders. "Silence, fool!" He struck the
table. "It is my will. Fear nothing! I am Crillon, and I do not lose."

There was a superb self-confidence in the man, an arrogance, a courage,
which more than anything else persuaded his hearers that he was in
earnest, that he was not jesting with them.

"The terms are quite understood," he proceeded, grimly. "If I win, we go
free, M. Berthaud. If I lose, M. de Bazan goes free, and I undertake on
the honor of a nobleman to kill myself before daylight. Shall I say
within six hours? I have affairs to settle!"

Probably no one in the room felt astonishment equal to that of Berthaud.
A faint colour tinged his sallow cheeks; a fierce gleam of joy flashed
in his eyes. But all he said was, "Yes, I am satisfied."

"Then throw!" said Crillon, and leaning forward he took a candle from a
neighbouring table, and placed it beside him. "My friend," he added,
speaking to Bazan with earnest gravity, "I advise you to be quiet. If
you do not we shall quarrel."

His smile was as easy, his manner as unembarrassed, his voice as steady,
as when he had entered the room. The old gamesters who stood round the
table, and had seen, with interest indeed and some pity, but with no
great emotion, a man play his last stake, saw this, saw a man stake his
life for a whim, with very different feelings; with astonishment, with
admiration, with a sense of inferiority that did not so much gall their
pride as awaken their interest. For the moment, the man who was above
death, who risked it for a fancy, a trifle, a momentary gratification,
was a demigod. "Throw!" repeated Crillon, heedless and apparently
unconscious of the stir round him: "Throw! but beware of that candle!
Your sleeve is in it."

It was; it was singeing. Berthaud moved the candle, and as if his
enemy's _sang froid_ wounded him, he threw savagely, dashing down the
dice on the table, and lifting the box with a gesture of defiance. He
swore a frightful oath: his face was livid. He had thrown aces only.

"So!" murmured his opponent quietly. "Is that all? A thousand crowns to
a hundred that I better that! Five hundred to a hundred that I double
it! Will no one take me? Then I throw. Courage, my friend. I am
Crillon!"

He threw; an ace and a deuce.

"I waste nothing," he said.

But few heard the words--his opponent perhaps and one or two others; for
from end to end the room rang and the oaken rafters shook with a gre