That first evening, he rested after the fatigues of the journey. He merely strolled about on the Promenade des Anglais, in the cool of the evening, and lounged along the Quays or through the Public Garden. It was a fine town, Nice, and Franz was very much pleased with it. He had given his name at the hotel as Herr Karl von Forstemann, a gentleman from Vienna; and as he sauntered along now through that gay little city, with five hundred pounds sterling in his trousers pocket, and twenty thousand awaiting him in the bank at Monte Carlo, he felt for the moment like the person he called himself. His strut was still prouder and more jaunty than ever; he stared at the pretty girls under the palm-trees of the parade as if they all belonged to him; he twirled his short cane by the arcades of the Place Masséna with a millionaire swagger. After all, it’s easy as dirt to win thousands at roulette—if only you have a System. Strange how people will toil, and moil, and slave, and save, at a desk in London, when, here by this basking tideless Southern sea, this Tom Tiddler’s ground of fortune, they might pick up coin at will just as one picks up pebbles! Franz broke a bottle of champagne at ten o’clock, discounting his success, with two awfully jolly fellows he’d come across in the smoking-room. Nice seemed to be just cram-full of awfully jolly fellows! Then he went to bed early, and slept the sleep of the just till morning. After a cup of fragrant coffee and a fresh French roll—so unlike that bad bread man gets in London—he lounged over to the station, and took a first-class return to Monte Carlo. Oh, that exquisite journey! How bright it was, how sweet, how fairy-fair, how beautiful! Like all Tyrolese, Franz Lindner was by no means insensible to the charms of Nature; and that man must be blind and seared and dull indeed who wouldn’t gaze with hushed delight, the first time he saw them, on those endless blue bays, those craggy cliffs, those towering heights, those jagged precipices. Villefranche, with its two promontories and its quaint white town; the Cap Ferrat and its twin lighthouses; the peninsula of St Jean, with its indented outline; the great bluffs of Beaulieu; the tunnelled headlands of the coast; green water breaking white on tumbled masses in the sea; Eza, perched high on its pinnacle of rearing rock; the bastions of Monaco, rising sheer like some basking whale from the purple waves beneath; the hanging gardens of La Condamine, the bare mountains in the background: Franz drank them all in with delight and enthusiasm. But all only sharpened his zest for the game he had in view; what an enchanted tract of coast it was, to be sure, this land that led him up to the Palace of Luck, where he was to woo and win his twenty thousand pounds sterling!