you stopping for? I have nothing to say to you."

"Here we are, Madame," I announced. "Here is the moneychanger's office."

I entered to get the securities changed, while the Grandmother remained
outside in the porch, and the rest waited at a little distance, in
doubt as to their best course of action. At length the old lady turned
such an angry stare upon them that they departed along the road towards
the Casino.

The process of changing involved complicated calculations which soon
necessitated my return to the Grandmother for instructions.

"The thieves!" she exclaimed as she clapped her hands together. "Never
mind, though. Get the documents cashed--No; send the banker out to me,"
she added as an afterthought.

"Would one of the clerks do, Madame?"

"Yes, one of the clerks. The thieves!"

The clerk consented to come out when he perceived that he was being
asked for by an old lady who was too infirm to walk; after which the
Grandmother began to upbraid him at length, and with great vehemence,
for his alleged usuriousness, and to bargain with him in a mixture of
Russian, French, and German--I acting as interpreter. Meanwhile, the
grave-faced official eyed us both, and silently nodded his head. At the
Grandmother, in particular, he gazed with a curiosity which almost
bordered upon rudeness. At length, too, he smiled.

"Pray recollect yourself!" cried the old lady. "And may my money choke
you! Alexis Ivanovitch, tell him that we can easily repair to someone
else."

"The clerk says that others will give you even less than he."

Of what the ultimate calculations consisted I do not exactly remember,
but at all events they were alarming. Receiving twelve thousand florins
in gold, I took also the statement of accounts, and carried it out to
the Grandmother.

"Well, well," she said, "I am no accountant. Let us hurry away, hurry
away." And she waved the paper aside.

"Neither upon that accursed zero, however, nor upon that equally
accursed red do I mean to stake a cent," I muttered to myself as I
entered the Casino.

This time I did all I could to persuade the old lady to stake as little
as possible--saying that a turn would come in the chances when she
would be at liberty to stake more. But she was so impatient that,
though at first she agreed to do as I suggested, nothing could stop her
when once she had begun. By way of prelude she won stakes of a hundred
and two hundred gulden.

"There you are!" she said a