for this corsage, over which fell a thin watch-chain of gold studded with various stones. She wore a diminutive hat, composed of two similar wings, spangled with silver and with violet sequins. This stylish trinket, resting on her black hair, divided simply into two heavy folds, contrasted, like her dress and like her present occupation, with the character of her physiognomy. Her face was one of those, so rare in our aging civilization, imprinted with _la grande beauté_, the beauty that is unaffected by age, for it lies in the essential lines of the features, the shape of the head, the form of the brow, the curve of the chin, the droop of the eyelids. To those who knew of the Greek blood in her veins, the classic nobility of her face explained itself. Her father, General de Sallach, when aide-de-camp of the Commander-in-Chief at Zara, had married for love a Montenegrin girl at Bocca da Cattaro, who was the daughter of a woman of Salonica. This blood alone could have moulded a face at the same time so magnificent and so delicate, whose warm pallor added to its vague suggestion of the Orient. But her eyes lacked the happy and passionate lustre of the East. They were of an indefinable color, brown verging upon yellow, with something dim about them, as though perpetually obscured by an inner distress. One read in them an _ennui_ so profound, a lassitude so incurable, that after perceiving this expression one began in spite of one's self to pity this woman apparently so fortunate, and to feel an impulse to obey her slightest whim if so her admirable face might lose that look, if but for a second. Yet doubtless it was one of those effects of the physiognomy which signify nothing of the soul, for her eyes retained the same singular expression at this moment while she abandoned herself to the wild fancies of the play. She must have gained an enormous sum since Corancez had left her, for a pile of thousand-franc notes--fifty perhaps--lay before her, and many columns of twenty-franc and hundred-franc pieces. Her gloved hands, armed with a little rake, manipulated this mass of money with dexterous grace. The cause of the feverish curiosity around her was that she risked at every turn the maximum stake: nine napoleons on a single number, that of her age, thirty-one, an equal number of napoleons on the squares, and six thousand francs on the black. The alternations of loss and gain were so great, and she met them with such evident impassibility, that she naturally had become the centre of interest. Oblivious to the comments that were whispered around her, she seemed scarcely to interest herself even in the ball that bounded over the numbered compartments. "I assure you that she is an archduchess," said one. "She is a Russian princess," declared another; "there is no one but a Russian for that game there." "Let her win but three or four times and the bank is broken." "She can't win, it is only the color that saves her."