dlers and morning
players gathered there to listen to the music and to drink and dine.
Here in this hall the intrigues begun on the promenade or in the
gambling-rooms were helped along by the ample opportunities of meeting,
with the passions stimulated by the music and the wine. At 4 o'clock
many took an afternoon nap. Then came the chief event of the day, the
ponderous table d'hote. At 9 p.m. every one flocked to the Casino, and
the game went merrily on until midnight. Then to bed, each and all with
more or less Rudesheimer or Hochheimer stowed away.

At the time of which I speak many were my idle days, in which I was free
to seek pleasure. I used to find much enjoyment in frequenting the
Casino to watch the people and to play the role of "looker-on in
Vienna," which, by the way, is a star role and therefore rather
agreeable. One evening while watching the rouge-et-noir I noticed a lady
just in front of me, magnificently dressed in all, save that there was
an entire absence of jewelry. She was literally dressed to kill, and,
although near 50, yet to the casual observer she seemed no more than 40,
or even less. She was a well-preserved woman of the world, and was known
as the Countess de Winzerole. This was the adventuress who had married
Van Tromp some two years before. What a career had been that of this
woman!

She had been mistress from first to last of a dozen men, noblemen,
diplomats, soldiers, but being an inveterate gambler, one after another
saw, with dismay, the cash, estates, diamonds, carriages, costly furs
and laces he showered upon her all go whirling into the ever-open maw of
the Casino, or in the drawing-room games of the bon-ton in Paris or
Petersburg. One brave youth, an officer in the Prussian Guards, had, in
his infatuation for the Countess, and impregnable, as he thought,
against bankruptcy by reason of his great fortune, tried to satisfy her
cravings for splendor of entourage and her infatuation for gambling. The
result was that one day the crack of a pistol-shot was heard in the
Countess' chamber, and the servants rushing in found the young bankrupt
dead, lying across the bed, with a bullet through the heart. The next
day a horde of clamorous creditors besieged the house, where the
Countess calmly told them she had sent for her bankers and on the morrow
they would be paid. That night his comrades buried their dead friend
with military honors. At midnight the cortege passed the hotel, and all
eye