And the sweet, peaceful moonlight resting over the place, cut by the dark shadows of the tall, straight palms and the eucalyptus-trees—does its gentle enchantment fall upon her soul after the excitements of the day? No, it only whispers fresh awakenings of the gambling fever in her, as she mentally recapitulates all the incidents of the day’s play. But you must see her at the tables! There she sits, a picturesque figure in the midst of a motley, _bizarre_ group of gamblers gathered around the table, all eager and intense, most of them maintaining a deliberate coolness, but all linked by a common passion, the chance of gain. She was at the doors of the Casino before noon, so as to secure her seat, waiting amid a crowd which comprised some of the gambling scum of Monte Carlo as well as illustrious members of our own nobility. Then as she went in, she made straight for the cloak-room, that she might leave her wrap there and get a numbered ticket in exchange. She was very eager about this, reading the number excitedly, for Mrs. Hazard, like most gamblers, is superstitious, and her present superstition is to place her stakes upon the numbers on the roulette table corresponding with those on her cloak-ticket. She feels that her luck to-day depends upon this, just as on another day, perhaps, she will only play when a certain _croupier_ is officiating, believing that he alone will bring her good fortune. Mrs. Hazard is a plunger, and she generally commences operations with about fifty louis, so that her winnings are proportionately large, and the stake is substantial enough to make the excitement keen. Once she has placed her pieces, nothing else has any interest for her. She gives herself up, body and soul, to the play. She knows nothing that goes on around her. She takes no cognisance of the heartburnings, the awful anxieties, or the intense pleasures that may reveal themselves in the faces of other players. She only notices the _croupier_ and the table. Some hopeless young man might have just lost the last penny of his inheritance, and, unable to face ruin might be leaving her side with despair on his face and desolation in his heart, to seek the shameful death of the suicide. Another might have squandered a fortune he held in trust for others—perhaps helpless children—and, having swerved from the path of honesty, be doomed henceforth to a life of fraud and degrading adventure. A wretched wife and mother might have played her last stake, and thus lost her only chance of redeeming her wrecked fortune and her husband’s credit, except at the price of her honour; and these unhappy creatures might go their hopeless ways, as others, sanguine or desperate, come and fill their places; but Mrs. Hazard does not heed them. They have no existence for her, though at any other time her heart would bleed for them, and she would talk of them with deep womanly sympathy; now she only watches the numbers, and the little roulette ball, and her gold pieces.