He turned to the table again with a defiant swagger of independence and placed two rolls of money upon the cloth, casting at the same moment a childish look of displeasure at his wife. “You see,” said the Plunger, with a deprecatory turning out of his hands. But there was so much grief on the girl's face that he turned again to the gambler and touched his arm. He could not tell why he was so interested in these two. He had witnessed many such scenes before, and they had not affected him in any way except to make him move out of hearing. But the same dumb numbness in his head, which made so many things seem possible that should have been terrible even to think upon, made him stubborn and unreasonable over this. He felt intuitively--it could not be said that he thought--that the woman was right and the man wrong, and so he grasped him again by the arm, and said sharply this time: “Come away! Do you hear? You are acting foolishly.” But even as he spoke the red won, and the Frenchman with a boyish gurgle of pleasure raked in his winnings with his two hands, and then turned with a happy, triumphant laugh to his wife. It is not easy to convince a man that he is making a fool of himself when he is winning some hundred francs every two minutes. His silent arguments to the contrary are difficult to answer. But the Plunger did not regard this in the least. “Do you hear me?” he said in the same stubborn tone and with much the same manner with which he would have spoken to a groom. “Come away.” Again the Frenchman tossed off his hand, this time with an execration, and again he placed the rolls of gold coin on the red; and again the red won. “My God!” cried the girl, running her fingers over the rolls on the table, “he has won half of the 20,000 francs. Oh, sir, stop him, stop him!” she cried. “Take him away.” “Do you hear me!” cried the Plunger, excited to a degree of utter self-forgetfulness, and carried beyond himself; “you've got to come with me.” “Take away your hand,” whispered the young Frenchman, fiercely. “See, I shall win it all; in one grand _coup_ I shall win it all. I shall win five years' pay in one moment.” He swept all of the money forward on the red and threw himself over the table to see the wheel. “Wait, confound you!” whispered the Plunger, excitedly. “If you will risk it, risk it with some reason. You can't play all that money; they won't take it. Six thousand francs is the limit, unless,” he ran on quickly, “you divide the 12,000 francs among the three of us. You understand, 6,000 francs is all that any one person can play; but if you give 4,000 to me, and 4,000 to your wife, and keep 4,000 yourself, we can each chance it. You can back the red if you like, your wife shall put her money on the numbers coming up below eighteen, and I will back the odd. In that way you stand to win 24,000 francs if our combination wins, and you lose less than if you simply back the color. Do you understand?”