mustache, and a shock of brown hair, curiously upstanding, like Struwel
Peter's.

"I am _so_ sorry," she repeated. "Please ask for it back. What did you want
me to play?"

"I don't know. It doesn't matter, so long as you've put it somewhere."

"But I've put it _en plein_ on Seventeen," she urged. "I ought to have
thought what I was doing."

"Why think?" he murmured.

Mrs. Middlemist turned square to the table and fixed her eyes on the staked
louis. In spite of the blue-eyed man's implied acquiescence she felt
qualms of responsibility. Why had she not played on an even chance, or one
of the dozens, or even a _transversale_? To add to her discomfort no one
else played the full seventeen. The whole table seemed silently jeering at
her inexperience.

The croupiers had completed the payments of the last coup. The marble fell
with its sharp click and whizzed and rattled around the disc. Zora held her
breath. The marble found its compartment at last, and the croupier
announced:

_"Dix-sept, noir, impair et manque."_

She had won. A sigh of relief shook her bosom. Not only had she not lost a
stranger's money, but she had won for him thirty-five times his stake. She
watched the louis greedily lest it should be swept away by a careless
croupier--perhaps the only impossible thing that could not happen at Monte
Carlo--and stretched out her arm past the bland old lady in tense
determination to frustrate further felonious proceedings. The croupier
pitched seven large gold coins across the table. She clutched them
feverishly and turned to deliver them to their owner. He was nowhere to be
seen. She broke through the ring, and with her hands full of gold scanned
the room in dismayed perplexity.

At last she espied him standing dejectedly by another table. She rushed
across the intervening space and held out the money.

"See, you have won!"

"Oh, Lord!" murmured the man, removing his hands from his dinner-jacket
pockets, but not offering to take his winnings. "What a lot of trouble I
have given you."

"Of course you have," she said tartly. "Why didn't you stay?"

"I don't know," he replied. "How can one tell why one doesn't do things?"

"Well, please take the money now and let me get rid of it. There are seven
pieces of five louis each."

She counted the coins into his hand, and then suddenly flushed scarlet. She
had forgotten to claim the original louis which she had staked. Where was
it? What had become of it? As wel