The corners of Zora Middlemist's ripe lips drooped with a child's pathos of
disillusionment. Her nose delicately marked disgust at the heavy air and
the discord of scents around her. Having lost her money she could afford to
survey with scorn the decorous yet sordid greed of the crowded table. There
was not a gleam of gaiety about it. The people behaved with the correct
impassiveness of an Anglican congregation. She had heard of more jocular
funerals.
She forgot the intoxication of her first gold and turquoise day at Monte
Carlo. A sense of loneliness--such as a solitary dove might feel in a
wilderness of evil bats--oppressed her. Had she not been aware that she
was a remarkably attractive woman and the object of innumerable glances,
she would have cried. And twenty louis pitched into unprofitable space! Yet
she stood half fascinated by the rattle of the marble on the revolving
disc, the glitter of the gold, the soft pat of the coins on the green cloth
as they were thrown by the croupier. She began to make imaginary stakes.
For five coups in succession she would have won. It was exasperating. There
she stood, having pierced the innermost mystery of chance, without even a
five-franc piece in her purse.
A man's black sleeve pushed past her shoulder, and she saw a hand in front
of her holding a louis. Instinctively she took it.
"Thanks," said a tired voice. "I can't reach the table. She threw it, _en
plein_, on Number Seventeen; and then with a start, realizing what she had
done, she turned with burning cheeks.
"I _am_ so sorry."
Her glance met a pair of unspeculative blue eyes, belonging to the owner of
the tired voice. She noted that he had a sallow face, a little brown
mustache, and a shock of brown hair, curiously upstanding, like Struwel
Peter's.
"I am _so_ sorry," she repeated. "Please ask for it back. What did you want
me to play?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter, so long as you've put it somewhere."
"But I've put it _en plein_ on Seventeen," she urged. "I ought to have
thought what I was doing."
"Why think?" he murmured.
Mrs. Middlemist turned square to the table and fixed her eyes on the staked
louis. In spite of the blue-eyed man's implied acquiescence she felt
qualms of responsibility. Why had she not played on an even chance, or one
of the dozens, or even a _transversale_? To add to her discomfort no one
else played the full seventeen. The whole table seemed silently jeering at
her inexperience.
The croupiers had completed the payments of the last coup. The marble fell
with its sharp click and whizzed and rattled around the disc. Zora held her
breath. The marble found its compartment at last, and the croupier
announced:
_"Dix-sept, noir, impair et manque."_