crumpled
bank-notes into my pockets and collecting all the gold that was left on
the table. Seizing up my last note for five hundred gulden, I contrived
to insinuate it, unperceived, into the hand of the pale lady. An
overpowering impulse had made me do so, and I remember how her thin
little fingers pressed mine in token of her lively gratitude. The whole
affair was the work of a moment.

Then, collecting my belongings, I crossed to where trente et quarante
was being played--a game which could boast of a more aristocratic
public, and was played with cards instead of with a wheel. At this
diversion the bank made itself responsible for a hundred thousand
thalers as the limit, but the highest stake allowable was, as in
roulette, four thousand florins. Although I knew nothing of the
game--and I scarcely knew the stakes, except those on black and red--I
joined the ring of players, while the rest of the crowd massed itself
around me. At this distance of time I cannot remember whether I ever
gave a thought to Polina; I seemed only to be conscious of a vague
pleasure in seizing and raking in the bank-notes which kept massing
themselves in a pile before me.

But, as ever, fortune seemed to be at my back. As though of set
purpose, there came to my aid a circumstance which not infrequently
repeats itself in gaming. The circumstance is that not infrequently
luck attaches itself to, say, the red, and does not leave it for a
space of say, ten, or even fifteen, rounds in succession. Three days
ago I had heard that, during the previous week there had been a run of
twenty-two coups on the red--an occurrence never before known at
roulette--so that men spoke of it with astonishment. Naturally enough,
many deserted the red after a dozen rounds, and practically no one
could now be found to stake upon it. Yet upon the black also--the
antithesis of the red--no experienced gambler would stake anything, for
the reason that every practised player knows the meaning of "capricious
fortune." That is to say, after the sixteenth (or so) success of the
red, one would think that the seventeenth coup would inevitably fall
upon the black; wherefore, novices would be apt to back the latter in
the seventeenth round, and even to double or treble their stakes upon
it--only, in the end, to lose.

Yet some whim or other led me, on remarking that the red had come up
consecutively for seven times, to attach myself to that colour.
Probably this was mostly due