Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/81

Rh "It's an odd thing," she said in a low voice, "but I don't see here any of the people I'm accustomed to see at Monte Carlo. As a rule, whenever one goes to this kind of place one meets people one has seen before. We gamblers are a caste—a sect part!"

"I can't bear to hear you call yourself a gambler," said Sylvia in a low voice.

Anna laughed good-humouredly.

"Believe me, my dear, there is not the difference you apparently think there is between a gambler and the man who has never touched a card."

Anna Wolsky looked round her as she spoke with a searching glance, and then she suddenly exclaimed,

"Yes, I do know someone here after all! That funny-looking couple over there were at Aix-les-Bains all last summer."

"Which people do you mean?" asked Sylvia eagerly.

"Don't you see that long, thin man who is so queerly dressed—and his short, fat wife? A dreadful thing happened to them—a great friend of theirs, a Russian, was drowned in Lac Bourget. It made a great deal of talk in Aix at the time it happened."

Sylvia Bailey looked across the room. She was able to pick out in a moment the people Anna meant, and perhaps because she was in good spirits to-night, she smiled involuntarily at their rather odd appearance.

Standing just behind the croupier—whose task it is to rake in and to deal out the money—was a short, stout, dark woman, dressed in a bright purple gown, and wearing a pale blue bonnet particularly unbecoming to her red, massive face. She was not paying much attention