, and whose mission was to appropriate or else to thwart our
secret. The following day two of us drove into Nice and deposited our
notes of credit at one of the most important banks, the manager looking
at us with an oddly repressed smile, as though he detected in us a new
contingent of dupes. We went back to Monte Carlo armed with two small
steel safes, one for such capital as was needed for our immediate
purposes, the other for our prospective winnings. Jerningham, who had a
curious talent for initiating intimacies everywhere, had meanwhile
managed to ascertain from somebody that, if we desired to secure
preferential civility from the croupiers, the right thing to do was to
make each of them a present of fairly good cigars, gifts of money being
naturally not allowed. This was done, and ultimately we began our play
feeling as children do when they first put their feet into sea water.

We played in couples, one player calculating the stakes, the other
placing them on the table. The couples were to play alternately, one
giving place to another as soon as the winnings amounted to fifty
pounds. When the total winnings of both reached a hundred pounds we
stopped. We played it for that day no longer.

For three weeks the whole thing went like clockwork. We ground out our
daily gains--a hundred pounds on an average--as though they were coffee
from a coffee mill. But at the beginning of the fourth week the fates
were for the first time against us. We lost in the course of a morning
about half the sum which it had cost us the labor of three weeks to win.
We were not, however, daunted. We resolved that for the future no couple
of players should bring into the rooms more than five hundred pounds,
and should this sum be lost we would suspend our proceedings for the day
and start afresh next morning. This arrangement being made, our
successes began again. A risked capital of five hundred pounds regularly
yielded a return of 10 per cent. in not much more than an hour, and we
had nearly recovered the whole of our previous loss when a catastrophe
occurred owing to causes which had not come into our calculations. One
of our couples, not finding that they were winning as fast as they had
hoped to do, completely lost their heads, and began throwing money on
the tables without any system at all. The result was that in less than a
quarter of an hour every penny which they had brought with them had
disappeared. Beckett, as the only person w