She found herself in a broad, low-ceilinged room that looked as if it had been rigged up as a doss-house at short notice--which was the fact. Around the walls ran a double tier of bunks on which men slept or smoked or read according to temperament, while others carried on a low conversation. In the centre of the room, under the hanging oil lamp, stood a greasy table about which sat a dozen toughs gambling. The air was thick with smoke and heavy with the nauseating reek of stale beer. It seemed as if no window had ever been opened upon it. Few of the men spared her a second glance. The alert silence which had succeeded her entry dissolved into a murmur of talk. She crossed the room to a row of barrels which seemed to do duty for chairs, and sat down, blinking through the smoke which wreathed before her eyes from the dangling fag-end in her mouth. Her hand came in contact with a bottle. She picked it up by the neck and drained the small quantity of bitter fluid there was left in the bottom, and set it down again with a clatter, wiping her lips on the back of her hand. After a while she strolled over to the table. She recognised the game they were playing, and was amazed that they should know it, for thugs of that class do not as a rule patronise Monte Carlo, and yet they were undoubtedly on familiar terms with chemin-de-fer. While she watched, a burly ruffian in blue jeans swung round and caught her arm. "Comin' in on this yer game, cuddy?" he asked. "Don't know it," she answered, playing her part smoothly. "Come on!" he insisted boisterously. "Yer c'n learn, same as I 'ad to. It ain't much of a game, but there's dam' few Britishers 'ere an' it soots these bloomin' furriners." She understood then that the cosmopolitan crowd who provided the majority of the gathering in the room were the cause of the departure from the time-honoured gambles of the Englishman, and to save trouble she took the place the patriotic tough made for her. It was getting her no farther in her quest, however, except that it gave her time to deduce that the French janitor had not found Prester John. In a few minutes the gamblers were deep in a hated wrangle about the destination of certain stakes, and, taking advantage of the diversion, she slipped from the bench and sidled unostentatiously to the door. The passage outside was in darkness, but in a moment a thin pencil of light flicked out from her hand, roving across the walls. The man who had admitted her had not entered the doss-room, so she gathered that other rooms were similarly equipped. It would be necessary to proceed warily. Directly across the corridor her torch revealed a door like the one through which she had just passed, and, stealing forward, she heard through it a subdued hum of talk. That, at least, was a spot to avoid. Turning to her right, the beam showed that the far end of the passage twisted abruptly to the left, and she crept towards the bend, using the flashlight sparingly.