she felt too strange and shy to expostulate she stood fingering her
empty purse.

The scene was utterly different from what she had expected. She had
imagined a gay, crowded room, wild gamblers shouting in their excitement, a
band playing delirious waltz music, champagne corks popping merrily,
painted women laughing, jesting loudly, all kinds of revelry and devilry
and Bacchic things undreamed of. This was silly of her, no doubt, but the
silliness of inexperienced young women is a matter for the pity, not the
reprobation, of the judicious. If they take the world for their oyster and
think, when they open it, they are going to find pearl necklaces
ready-made, we must not blame them. Rather let hoary-headed sinners envy
them their imaginings.

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