e
marble work of parapets and steps was unsplintered by frosts. The whole
was like a conservatory with the sky for its dome.

For want of other occupation he went round towards the public entrance
to the Casino, and ascended the great staircase into the pillared hall.
It was possible, after all, that upon leaving the hotel and sending on
their luggage they had taken another turn through the rooms, to
follow by a later train. With more than curiosity he scanned first the
reading-rooms, only however to see not a face that he knew. He then
crossed the vestibule to the gaming-tables.

IV.

Here he was confronted by a heated phantasmagoria of splendour and a
high pressure of suspense that seemed to make the air quiver. A low
whisper of conversation prevailed, which might probably have been not
wrongly defined as the lowest note of social harmony.

The people gathered at this negative pole of industry had come from
all civilized countries; their tongues were familiar with many forms of
utterance, that of each racial group or type being unintelligible in its
subtler variations, if not entirely, to the rest. But the language of
meum and tuum they collectively comprehended without translation. In a
half-charmed spell-bound state they had congregated in knots, standing,
or sitting in hollow circles round the notorious oval tables marked with
figures and lines. The eyes of all these sets of people were watching
the Roulette. Somerset went from table to table, looking among the
loungers rather than among the regular players, for faces, or at least
for one face, which did not meet his gaze.

The suggestive charm which the centuries-old impersonality Gaming,
rather than games and gamesters, had for Somerset, led him to loiter on
even when his hope of meeting any of the Power and De Stancy party had
vanished. As a non-participant in its profits and losses, fevers and
frenzies, it had that stage effect upon his imagination which is
usually exercised over those who behold Chance presented to them with
spectacular piquancy without advancing far enough in its acquaintance to
suffer from its ghastly reprisals and impish tricks. He beheld a hundred
diametrically opposed wishes issuing from the murky intelligences around
a table, and spreading down across each other upon the figured diagram
in their midst, each to its own number. It was a network of hopes; which
at the announcement, 'Sept, Rouge, Impair, et Manque,' disappeared like