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88 had seen her: turning at the door of her bed-chamber to look back at him, a vision of perturbing charm in her rose-silk dressing-gown, with rich hair loosened, cheeks softly glowing, eyes brilliant with an emotion illegible to her one beholder.…

What had been the message of those eyes, flashed down the dimly lighted length of that corridor at Troyon's, ere she vanished?

Adieu? Or au revoir? …

She had termed him, naïvely enough, a gentleman.

But if she knew—suspected—even dreamed—that he was what he was …?

He shook his head again, but now impatiently, with a scowl and a grumble:

"What's the matter with me anyway? Mooning over a girl I never saw before to-night! As if it matters a whoop in Hepsidam what she thinks! … Or is it possible I'm beginning to develop a rudimentary conscience, at this late day? Me! …"

If there were anything in this hypothesis, the growing-pains of that late-blooming conscience were soon enough numbed by the hypnotic spell of clattering chips, an ivory ball singing in an ebony race, and croaking croupiers.

For Lanyard's chair at the table of chemin-de-fer had been filled by another and, too impatient to wait a vacancy, he wandered on to the salon dedicated to roulette, tested his luck by staking a note of five hundred francs on the black, won, and incontinently subsided into a chair and an oblivion that endured for the space of three-quarters of an hour.