und, unnoticed and unseen; for if
those plate-glass doors swung suddenly open to admit the seven angels
of the Apocalypse, carrying the seven golden vials filled with the
wrath of God, it is doubtful whether the splendour of their awful
glory, or the trumpet-notes that heralded their coming, would have
power to arouse the players from their profound abstraction.

Half a dozen comfortable little patrimonies seem to have changed hands
while the traveller has been looking on; and yet he has only watched
the table for about ten minutes; and this splendid _salon_ is but an
outer chamber, where one may stake as shabby a sum as two francs, if
one is shabby enough to wish to do so, and where playing for half an
hour or so on a pleasant summer morning one could scarcely lose more
than fifty or sixty pounds. Another pair of plate-glass doors open into
an inner chamber, where the silence is still more profound, and where
around a larger table sit one row of players; while only here and there
a little group of outsiders stand behind their chairs. There is more
gilding on the walls and ceiling of this chamber; the frescoes are more
delicate; the crystal chandeliers are adorned with rich clusters of
sparkling drops, that twinkle like diamonds in the sun. This is the
temple of gold; and in this splendid chamber one may hazard no smaller
stake than half a napoleon. There are women here; but not so many women
as in the outer saloon; and the women here are younger and prettier and
more carefully dressed than those who stake only silver.

The prettiest and the youngest woman in this golden chamber on one
particular August afternoon, nine years after the death of Tom
Halliday, was a girl who stood behind the chair of a military-looking
Englishman, an old man whose handsome face was a little disfigured by
those traces which late hours and dissipated habits are supposed to
leave behind them.

The girl held a card in one hand and a pin in the other, and was
occupied in some mysterious process, by which she kept note of the
Englishman's play. She was very young, with a delicate face, in whose
softer lines there was a refined likeness to the features of the man
whose play she watched. But while his eyes were hard and cold and gray,
hers were of that dense black in which there seems such an unfathomable
and mysterious depth. As she was the handsomest, so she was also the
worst-dressed woman in the room. Her flimsy silk mantle had faded from
b